When Portuguese organist David Maranha and tenor sax hero Rodrigo Amado released their debut duo album, Wrecks (European Echoes, 2024), fellow Portuguese composer Bernardo Devlin suggested that the live, free improvised 45-minute free jazz, drone piece referred to the state of the world and wondered if it was «the product of a moment in time or was it a manifestation of an eternal undercurrent buzz?»
The follow-up album, Desolation Row, was recorded live at ADAO in Barreiro in October 2025, as part of the OUT.FEST festival. Amado took the cover photo. The album carries the title of a classic Bob Dylan’s song whose poetic images speak of a «blind commissioner» who runs the «circus in town», and refers to other mythical characters who are being poisoned by words.
The 41-minute free improvised «Desolation Row» piece sounds as if it captures the current zeitgeist; certainly from my humble location on the planet. It is tempting to describe it in similar spiritual, mythical, even biblical terms. The music is powerful and deeply immersive, demanding full surrender to its urgent, massive walls of sound.
Stuart Broomer, who contributed insightful liner notes, finds two reference points to this kind of powerful music filled with passionate faith – «the work of Olivier Messiaen, whose faith found expression in every musical form” and “the later music of John Coltrane”, later extended by Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. Broomer calls it “a structural but free pan-modalism, a singularity of organ and architecture resembling Messiaen, and an expressive power equal to those great tenor saxophonists».
But «Desolation Row» is far from focusing on a complex sonic architecture. Its power lies in its emotional, lyrical urgency and intensity, its broken melodic cries, and soulful, almost psychedelic storms as if Maranha and Amado were totally possessed, transformed – or ascending, in a Coltrane-ish manner, almost literally – by their own cathartic, spiritual-liberating creation. This deeply touching music represents in its own special way a Sisyphusian resistance to the current tough times. It offers a most beautiful, invigorating antidote of love, desire, and freedom that motivates us to take part in the struggle against local and global stupidities (as Mats Gustafsson keeps saying). The message was well received according to the audience’s response.
Eyal Hareuveni
David Maranha (electric organ), Rodrigo Amado (tenor saxophone)
