There are a few young double bass players who enjoy such intimacy with the French master of the bull fiddle Joëlle Léandre like young Brazilian-born, Vienna-based Vinicius Cajado. Léandre praised Cajado’s debut solo album, Monu (Urchin, 2021), and both Léandre and Cajado were influenced by the musical philosophy of John Cage. Storm Dance documents Léandre and Cajado’s live concert at Alte Schmiede in Vienna in December 2022.

Cajado, who performed with other innovative double bass legends like Barre Phillips and Mark Dresser (who contributed liner notes to this album), is well-versed with extended bowing techniques and like Léandre, he is a fearless and adventurous improviser with strong poetic tendencies. Storm Dance features six vivid and soulful, free improvised «Dances» that cement the immediate and intimate affinity between Léandre and Cajado as well as their sonic imagination.

In the first two «Dances», Léandre and Cajado dance and soar around each other, tempting and provoking with bowed articulations and many extended bowing and pizzicato tricks, building a positive tension and enjoying this kind of playful, free-associative dynamics that are full of textural richness, motivic development and rhythmic vitality. In the third «Dance» Léandre begins with her singular stream-of-thoughts gibberish-operatic vocalization and pushes the interplay to a sensual but stormy level, with great pathos, but her vocalization on the fifth «Dance» takes the interplay into a theatrical, dadaist-comic show, in a way that only Léandre capable of. The sixth «Dance» is an emotional and poetic encore that celebrates the mastery of the double bass and the camaraderie of this meeting.

Eyal Hareuveni

Joëlle Léandre (double bass, voice), Vinicius Cajado (double bass)