«Room With No Name» is the second album of the trio of the promising, young European free improvisers – prolific Portuguese trumpeter Luís Vicente, Belgian pianist Seppe Gebruers and Dutch drummer Onno Govaert (of Spinifex and Catus Truck). Like the debut album of this trio, Live in Lubjliana (MultiKulti Project, 2018, recorded live during Sound Disobedience Festival in March 2017), this album was recorded live at the Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro in Coimbra, Portugal, in July 2021. The three musicians also collaborated with each other in various formats, live and on record, especially Vicente and Govaert, in recent years.

The album features two, untitled and extended improvisations. Vicente introduces a lyrical and highly melodic tone to the first improvisation, contrasted by the cerebral, impressionistic approach of Gebruers (who plays unprepared piano) and the pulse-free, imaginative percussive colors of Govaert. But soon the trio cooks its intense, dramatic collisions between a few sparse segments, all highlighting the strong musical personalities of these gifted musicians and their idiosyncratic languages. Still, the music flows organically, stresses the deep listening qualities of the trio, and needs no more than a nameless room and an attentive audience to create its magic. Subtle melodic veins shine briefly throughout this 30-minute improvisation and are soon abstracted into more open, cryptic textures, and vice versa, in totally spontaneous and immediate dynamics.

The second, 19-minute improvisation is more introspective, contemplative and poetic, and brings the open and democratic interplay of the trio into its most profound, and original dynamics. Ideas and gestures are constantly deconstructed and reconstructed in unpredictable ways, as this trio of masters of the art of the moment continues to work as one sonic entity.

Eyal Hareuveni  

Luís Vicente (tp), Seppe Gebruers (p), Onno Govaert (dr)