Birds and Cages is the sophomore album of Portugues, Lisbon-based jazz trumpeter-composer-educator Gonçalo Marques’ American quartet featuring pianist Jacob Sacks (who joined Marques Trio in Canção do Homem Simples, Robalo, 2017), double bass player Masa Kamaguchi and drummer Jeff Williams, following Linhas (Carimbo Porta-jazz, 2019). The album was recorded at Convento dos Capuchos in colares in November 2023.
Marques, who graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2005, kept his musical ties with his comrades from the other side of the Atlantic. Birds and Cages is Marques’ fifth album as a bandleader-composer and reflects his long-time fascination with the writings of Austrian-Czech novelist and writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and his dark, surreal and slightly humorous stories. The music was inspired by the feelings and atmosphere of Kafka’s short stories and events of his life.
The opening piece is dedicated to Kafka’s friend Max Brod who disobeyed Kafka’s last wishes and failed to burn his books. The atmosphere differs from the straight-ahead jazz of the quartet’s debut album Linhas. It is more complex often abstract and more contemplative, leaving greater freedom for the quartet to interpret Marques’ compositional ideas, and with atypical structures that undermine standard jazz pieces. Marques cements this atmosphere with an introspective, lyrical solo that thinks if Brod was right by disobeying Kafka. The following «The vulture», after a short story by Kafka, introduces the unsettling, brutal world of Kafka who tells about a man attacked by a bird. Now Marques leads the quartet into a restless, tension-filled commotion. The ballad «The hunger artist», follows Kafka’s story about the decadence of a once-popular circus artist whose act consists of fasting in a cage, and highlights Marques’ beautiful, ethereal and warm tone as well as his strong melodic sensibility and the attentive, intimate, melancholic dynamic of the quartet.
«July the 21st» relates to an entry of Kafka to his diary in 1912: «Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair», and suggests the more playful side of the quartet. «A cage went looking for a bird» returns to the abstract, melancholic spirit as it refers to Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination and one of his most famous aphorisms. «Dr. Bucephalus», once Alexander the Great’s but now a lawyer, stresses the natural, flowing dynamics of the quartet. The touching, sparse «Milena» is dedicated to Milena Jesenská, who translated Kafka’s writings from English. This impressive, thoughtful album is closed with the mysterious and suggestive «A letter from Silesia», a famous letter Kafka wrote to his father, articulated by another beautiful and quite desperate solo of Marques.
Eyal Hareuveni
Gonçalo Marques (trumpet , flugelhorn), Jacob Sacks (piano), Masa Kamaguchi (double bass), Jeff Williams (drums)
