By Stuart Broomer
Released just three weeks apart in October, two new recordings by Rodrigo
Amado represent an embarrassment not of riches but meanings and values, in
a world seemingly tearing itself apart. As different as they are, each is a
masterpiece. Both recorded in mid-2023 in Lisbon, they also share very rare
and contradictory qualities. Each resonates strongly with the character of
certain great 1960s music: that is, a collective passion that initially
surmounts formal constraints, then breaks through to create ultimately
original formal structures. Simultaneously, each feels as immediate as this
week’s (November 4 to 10, 2024) headlines, whether it’s a flood in
Valencia, an election in America, an ongoing invasion in Ukraine, or an
unnameable and terrible mystery of genocides in Gaza and random stabbings
in too many other places to keep track. These musics are benedictions,
sometimes harsh, sometimes light-filled, always intense, musics of large
and transcendent feelings, a sonic equivalent to Boethius’s
Consolation of Philosophy
.
The Attic (Rodrigo Amado, Gonçalo Almeida, Onno Govaert) and Eve Risser –
La Grande Crue (No Business, 2024)
This CD was recorded on July 31, 2023, when the Attic — Amado’s trio with bassist Gonçalo Almeida and drummer Onno Govaert– and pianist Eve Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra were both performing at Lisbon’s Jazz em Agosto. The result of a first-time meeting, it’s a music of mature surprises, brilliant reactions that are somehow constantly integrated felicitously into the development of the music, resulting in work that is not just spontaneously composed, but which might be called spontaneously ordained or invoked.
Its gritty intensity is declared immediately in Almeida’s barbwire
arco
, something that will be matched by Govaert’s multi-directional explosions
and Amado’s tenor, his sound, at once both full and mobile, resembling that
of Coltrane during his last years (the sound announced on the summit that
was Meditations), when the bright metallic harmonics rolled off
for a warm roundness wedded to an intense, variable and taut vibrato. Along
with Amado’s shifting sound, sometimes from air to Getz to gravel in a
matter of seconds, there is also a surfeit of light in the music,
manifesting in a stream of meticulous detail to which everyone contributes.
Risser is a pianist of genius and empathy (evident since the trio CD
En Corps
with Benjamin Duboc and Edward Perraud [Dark
Tree, 2012]) and finds varied and distinct approaches on every track,
including a percussive upper register that can resemble a xylophone.
The track titles, in French, emphasize existential fundamentals: “Corps”
(body), “Peau” (skin), “Phrase” (sentence), “Pierre” (stone). The physical
design of the CD package represents profound reflection, even generations
of reflection. The jacket illustrations are paintings by Amado’s late
father, the distinguished Manuel Amado: they depict architectural interiors
that have filled with water: a blank-eyed sculpture of a woman invoking
antiquity appears in water; a white architectural column, similarly
immersed, casts a dark shadow. There’s a poem by Portuguese poet Nuno
Júdice, “Angle”, from his book Jeu de Reflets that serves as liner
note, appearing in both French and English. Each track title is the last
word in each of the last four lines in sequence. The book’s illustrations
came from the same series of paintings, La Grande Crue (“The Great
Flood”) by Manuel Amado, that supplies the images on the liner booklet as
well as the CD title. The first line of “Angle” is “A luminous reflection
dies on the waters of summer.” Along with leading the four movements of the
CD, Rodrigo Amado, also the CD’s designer, has created monument, memorial
and symphony.
David Maranha/ Rodrigo Amado – Wrecks (Nariz Entupido, 2024)
While one can easily go astray conflating a music’s meanings with current
events, Bernardo Devlin’s liner essay for Wrecks forcefully ties
its mood to the present state of world affairs:
And people, could you believe your luck to bear witness of the edgings of a
system slipping through the cracks of its own making? Jokes on EU leaders
abounded as Uncle Sam’s prophecies tormented somebody’s sleep one night and
Havana syndrome appeared on the mainstream news. Further in the east things
didn’t look brilliant either and they were coming closer. North and south,
poles were really melting and the Doomsday Clock had ran past it’s time.
Communications were being shut. What to do?
That aside, however, wrecks aren’t always a bad thing. This Wrecks
is a continuous meditation of 44:09 during which Amado on tenor saxophone
and David Maranha on electric organ construct a roaring, pulsing wall of
sound, sometimes modal, often multi-modal, continuously fractured and
refractive. It’s an explosion in a cathedral (to borrow an Alejo Carpentier
title) in which the ecstasies of the orderly (traditionally majestic church
music, clarion sound and modal reveries) combine with the ecstasies of
chaos (sounds compounding into noise and layers of dissonance).
Wrecks begins quietly with a reflective saxophone gradually
surrounded by scattered electric sounds and a rising drone. Soon there are
fractured polyphonics, circular runs that touch the tenor’s high and low
extremes, but that can turn rapidly to elegiac melody amidst the rising,
thickening, bruising wall of the organ and electronics that can suggest
scraped steel. At times, in the meditative moments particularly, the sounds
of the two musicians will merge in a synergy of the human and the machine.
Amado pauses briefly around the 36-minute mark after a sustained reverie,
leaving Maranha’s dense modal compound alone, only to return around the
39-minute mark, re-entering with a sustained high-pitch then gradually
developing a final oration built largely around a single determined phrase
that gradually moves from rough to sweet, a phrase that ultimately repeats
against Maranha’s machine song.
A departure from Amado’s highly interactive, usually acoustic trios and
quartets, Wrecks might be the most powerful recording to appear
this year, a brilliant fusion of impassioned lyricism and holy noise.