Ivo Perelman, Elliott Sharp, Cyro Baptista: Triacontagon

To better appreciate Triacontagon, it helps to wind the clock back to Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman's recordings from the mid-to-late 1990s. Consider Man of the Forest (GM Recordings, 1994), Brazilian Watercolour (Leo Records, 1999) and Aquarela do Brazil (Atração Fonográfica, 1999). Each featured fellow São Paulo native, percussionist Cyro Baptista. Perelman, who began his musical life playing guitar, eventually gravitated toward the tenor saxophone and the music of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. Two of those early recordings also featured Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali. Call it Perelman's free-jazz apprenticeship.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and adventurous listeners will recognize that Perelman has developed an improvisational language entirely his own. The same can be said of Baptista and guitarist Elliott Sharp, a central figure in New York's Downtown scene. Perelman and Sharp have already documented their musical relationship on two duos released by Mahakala Music, Artificial Intelligence (2023) and Trifecta (2026).

Triacontagon marks the first time the three musicians have been captured together. Choose your adjectives: eccentric, nonpareil, extraordinary. Add enthralling. Sharp and Baptista seem tailor-made for Perelman's modus operandi. There is no predetermined repertoire, no elaborate discussion of where the music might go. Perelman enters the studio, the tape rolls, and the musicians discover the music in real time.

Interestingly, only one of the album's six tracks, "Electric Bacchanalia," begins with Perelman's saxophone. The other five are set in motion by Sharp, Baptista or both, creating the conditions for the saxophonist's entrance. A pulsing guitar, percussive locomotion, bells, echoing guitar figures, whistling and even hints of Brazilian folk music become catalysts for Perelman's response.

The opening "Dionysus in the Amazon" snakes along a percussive, ritualistic trail, with Sharp and Baptista's constant motion providing a rhythmic bed for Perelman's soaring upper-register vocalizations. Metallic clangs and eerie guitar washes coat "Sacred Geometry of the Tropics," creating an atmosphere that feels simultaneously ancient and otherworldly. On "Irregular Forms in Human Space," bird calls from Baptista and Perelman mingle with Sharp's pulsing guitar before Baptista opens what sounds like a sonic medicine chest, moving through clapping, singing and an astonishing array of percussive inventions.

What makes Triacontagon so compelling is the absence of a conventional hierarchy. Perelman is not simply the soloist, Sharp is not merely the accompanist, and Baptista is doing far more than keeping time. Each musician generates material that the others absorb, transform and redirect. The result is less a conversation than a constantly mutating ecosystem of sound.

Triacontagon brings together three musicians with deeply individual vocabularies and gives them the freedom to collide without a safety net. Perelman's decades-long search for an expressive language, Baptista's boundless percussion and Sharp's restless guitar create music that is unpredictable without being arbitrary. The album doesn't so much document three musicians playing together as capture three imaginations discovering, moment by moment, what comes next.