Rodrigo Amado: The Healing

The Healing unites tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado and drummer Chris Corsano in a tremendous set that tempers visceral power with nuanced exchange. An archival release, it documents a 2016 live date at Lisbon's ZBD Club, marking the second recording by this duo, after a 2014 session issued as No Place To Fall (Astral Spirits, 2019). However the Portuguese reed player and American percussionist have been comrades since 2012 in a quartet completed by bassist Kent Kessler and saxophonist-trumpeter Joe McPhee responsible for three albums: This Is Our Language (Not Two, 2015), A History Of Nothing (Trost, 2018) and Let The Free Be Men (Trost, 2021).

That track record of shared risk-taking goes a long way to explain the symbiotic relationship heard here. While the fare resides firmly in the lineage of John Coltrane's seminal Interstellar Space (Impulse, 1970) duet with drummer Rashied Ali, the execution has inevitably become more distilled and fine-grained over the intervening five decades. Consequently, while they do unleash the expected fire breathing, it arrives leavened by more reflective interludes where insistence almost gives way to melody.

One of Europe's premier free saxophonists, Amado generates his own structure in real time. With a gruff, raw-edged tone, his lines advance through reiterated phrases that bloom into arrowing runs towards a destination only he can envisage. No stranger to such situations thanks to sojourns with iconoclastic reed botherers such as Paul Flaherty, Steve Baczkowski and Mette Rasmussen, Corsano's timbral ingenuity, fierce precision and propulsive acumen yield a continually evolving percussive platform to elevate the reedist's notions.

Near-titular opener "The Healing Day" uncorks plentiful examples of their simpatico sparring. A conversational beginning swiftly morphs into something more edgy as Amado's persistent yelps collide with Corsano's curated textures in a roiling cataract of intensity. Then in those abrupt shifts in dynamics—instantaneous joint decisions—which characterize their interplay, everything cools, at least a bit. Amado falls into muscular freeboppish runs, while Corsano throbs, before both accelerate once more.

If ultimately they ascend the same mountain each time, then they prospect different and sometimes unfrequented routes to attain the summit. And they rarely linger, finding greater interest in the terrain round about. By way of example, on "The Cry" Corsano's rattling snare and tinkling bells counter-intuitively undercut Amado's ripe falsetto honks while, at the outset of "Griot," the drummer's assembly of unconventional sounds—rustles, taps, flutters—into a clanking pulse, urges the saxophonist's restrained tenor towards angular alignment. Although undeniably exciting, this pairing realizes that the peaks retain their potency most effectively in small doses, and in so doing they reveal the truth that hard won discipline so often underpins spontaneity.

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