Portuguese prolific trumpeter Luís Vicente frames his first solo album with a poem by Portuguese poet-writer-philosopher Fernando Pessoa, «Ah, tudo é símbolo e analogia!» (Ah, everything is a symbol and analogy!). The title of the album, «Maré» (tide), is part of this poem (…Everything we see is something else. / The vast tide, the anxious tide, / It is the echo of another tide that is…). This poetic reference captures the deceiving essence of «Maré». If everything we see is actually something else, then what about what we listen to?

«Maré» was recorded at Convento de Santa Clara a Nova as part of Anozero – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra in November 2017. Vicente opens with the quiet and reserved «Lage Fria» where he suggests a lyrical and intimate talk with himself that employs cleverly the reverberating space of the monumental 17th century monastery. Vicente begins to employ experimental, extended breathing techniques on the following «Rampa» that enriches his melodic tone with delicate elements of distortion and noise and offer a more urgent and tensed interplay with the resonant space.

You can sense the inner, intimate dialog of Vicente with his instrument on the extended, 23-minutes «Quebra Mar». This piece sounds like a meditation on the elusive process of creating music, beginning with the breaths – and the extended breathing techniques – that produce the sound, moving to the raw, simple sounds, and how these brief sounds accumulate into melodic threads and concluding with how these melodies act and react in a given space. Vicente improvises-composed this piece as a classic choral suite, him with the trumpet as the obvious soloist but the reverberating echoes are layered as other, mirroring voices, and all voices are weaved into a most beautiful, untimely and emotional experience.

Eyal Hareuveni

Luís Vicente (tp)