The fourth album of Portuguese tenor sax hero Rodrigo Amado’s free improvising trio The Attic – with fellow Portuguese double bass master Gonçalo Almeida and Dutch drummer Onno Govaert – offers an inspired, poetic meeting with French pianist-composer Eve Risser (whose work was documented by Portuguese labels such as Clean Feed and JACC). La Grande Crue (The Great Flood) was recorded at Timbuktu Studios in Lisbon in July 2023, when Risser performed in Jazz em Agosto with her Red Desert Orchestra. The album is framed by a beautiful poem by Portuguese writer-poet Nuno Júdice, who passed away in March 2024, and a cover painting by the same name of Amado’s father, Manuel Amado, one of his generation’s most important Portuguese painters.
The titles of the four pieces – «Corps» (Body), «Peau» (Skin), «Phrase» (Sentence) and «Pierre» (rock) correspond with Júdice’s poem «ANGLE» (from the book «Jeu de Reflets», with paintings by Manuel Amado). Amado encourages total freedom and the extended, improvised pieces slowly gravitate toward their cohesive, instant compositional outlines. Amado flows with beautiful, touching ideas and alternates between lyrical and introspective modes and commanding, urgent and soulful, stormy outbursts. Almeida – in his pizzicato and arco playing – and Govaert offer free pulses, at times simply ornamenting and coloring the music with delicate, nuanced touches more than harnessing it into rhythmic patterns, but both also push Amado into stratospheric flights with hypnotic, propulsive drive. Risser adds an unpredictable, brilliant dimension to the telepathic, ever-explorative deep rapport of The Attic and proves that she is a perfect partner for such a free-spirited session. She intervened with precise, concise comments of her idiosyncratic lexicon, altering or provoking the course of the music with an incisive, evocative idea and then testing its effect before joining again with another immediate, spontaneous idea.
Magically, these gifted, wise improvisers find a perfect balance and the new, ad-hoc collective sounds bigger than its sums, making its music rich – or flooded – by poetic, spiritual dynamics and arresting. melodic themes. A true masterpiece of free improvisation and one of the best albums of 2024.
Portuguese David Maranha’s work encompasses sculpture, architecture and minimalist electro-acoustic music that focuses on harmonics and overtones. He has worked with Phill Niblock, David Grubbs, Will Guthrie, Arnold Dreyblatt, Jacob Kirkegaard, Carla Bozulich, Chris Cutler and Helge Sten, among many others, and founded the experimental, drone music project Osso Exótico. His duo album with Amado was recorded live at Escola do Largo in Lisbon in June 2023, when they performed in a double bill featuring the duo Will Guthrie and Container.
Wrecks features Maranha playing the electric organ with Amado playing the tenor sax. The minimalist, 44-minute piece suggests an abstract drone corresponding with noise and experimental music. The suggestive cover artwork by Portuguese visual artist Isabela Abate intensifies this abstract vibe. The album offers a short story by Portuguese singer-songwriter Bernardo Devlin who wonders about the current global crises and the powerful effects of the listening experience to this poetic, adventurous journey: «Was it some form of code? Was it despair? Was this music the product of a moment in time or was it a manifestation of an eternal undercurrent buzz?» Amado contrasts Maranha’s almost static, resonant and dissonant wall of organ sounds with resisting, emotional waves of sax cries and shouts. His playing is delivered with a sense of urgency and a bold attempt to pierce Maranha’s deeply immersive but disturbing wall of sounds.
Eyal Hareuveni
Rodrigo Amado (tenor saxophone), Gonçalo Almeida (double bass), Onno Govaert (drums), Eve Risser (piano); David Maranha (electric organ)
