MOVE is a new free jazz meets free improvisation trio featuring Brazilian, Lisbon-based bassist Felipe Zenícola, known from Paal Nilssen-Love’s New Brazilian Funk and Chinese Cookie Poets, and sax player Yedo Gibson, known from Naked Wolf, with Portuguese, drummer João Valinho, who plays in Rodrigo Amado Refraction Quartet and also did the cover art. The trio recorded its debut album at Desterro Club in Lisbon in June 2022.
The dynamics of this trio are urgent and brutal, uncompromising and explosive, chaotic and thorny, and bursting with restless ideas and addictive punkish intensity that brings all close to sonic meltdown. MOVE’smission is to explore the limits of interplay and communication throughout five compact pieces with raw and tough power, but also with perceptive and incisive construction.
The City demonstrates how activity and adaptability are strived for, communication and respect are paramount, and how everything is possible and the impossible is desired. Zenícola, Gibson and Valinho sound like updating the Albert Ayleri-ian spiritual ghost energy through the seminal work of Massacre, The Thing and ZU trios and suggest their own fiery and urban, high-octane recipe.
Zenícola returns in the Sameer trio with Portuguese guitarist Jorge Nuno, one of the co-founders of the Phonogram Unit and member of Ulvo Zebra and Voltaic Trio, and drummer-percussionist Felice Furioso, who played in the last incarnation of the local, experimental Ensemble MIA (with Valinho), was a member of the Italian collective Muzic Plus and also did the artwork for the debut album of Sameer. The album of this trio documents the first time this trio played together at Namouche Studios in Lisbon in April 2022.
The album of this trio is a sonic representation of the diverse and intense, chaotic and restless episodes experienced by an imaginary being called Sameer during its life. The music of this free improvising, power trio corresponds with the music of the MOVE, and both trios share similar raw and dense, distorted and effects-laden, punkish energy. But this trio’s dynamics are more spacious, open to dramatic melodies and even lyrical adventures, and with clearer rhythmic patterns, but no less addictive or gratifying ones.
Eyal Hareuveni
Felipe Zenícola (el.b), Yedo Gibson (s), João Valinho (dr), Felice Furioso (dr, perc), Jorge Nuno (el.g)
