Por la fuerza del hábito (By force of habit) is the sophomore album of young Colombian, Cologne-based guitarist-composer Daniel Felipe Tamayo Gómez and his quintet that was formed in 2017, following Unjustified Paranoia (Unit, 2021). The new album augments the jazz quintet with electronics player-composer Víctor Acevedo, adding an unpredictable dimension to the quintet dynamics.

The quintet – Tamayo on electric guitar, tenor sax player Yaroslav Likhachev, pianist Moritz Preisler, double bass player Conrad Noll – Double Bass and drummer Simon Bräumer – is rooted in the post-bop legacy. The addition of Acevedo shifts its focus to the symbiotic sonic interplay of the quintet with the electric guitar and its effects, and the acoustic instruments and the precomposed samples. Furthermore, the injection of the samples and the manipulated electronic sounds challenges the structured improvised segments and forces urgent, fragmented interplay on the already established dynamics of the quintet.

Acevedo has been working with the quintet since 2022. He keeps the quintet on its toes and charges and colors its music with cinematic-like tension and surprising, ghostly and otherworldly industrial-like noises, never surrendering into structured narratives. This kind of collaboration works best in the longer pieces like «Torso» and «Así e isa» where the solo electronic passages alternate with the electro-acoustic ones of the quintet and suggest intriguing landscapes that are fed up and evolve through this kind of constant interplay between the two aesthetics.

Eyal Hareuveni

Daniel Felipe Tamayo Gómez (guitar), Víctor Acevedo (electronics, guitar), Yaroslav Likhachev (tenor saxophone), Moritz Preisler (piano), Conrad Noll (double bass), Simon Bräumer (drums)