Triacontagon brings together three New York-based singular, free improvising voices – prolific Brazilian-born tenor sax player Ivo Perelman, a recent collaborator of Perelman, the equally prolific, innovative guitarist Elliott Sharp (on 8-string electric guitar), and, by the suggestion of Sharp, Brazilian-born percussionist-vocalist Cyro Baptista, who used to play closely with Perelman in the 1990s when his free jazz music reflected his Brazilian roots. The album was recorded at Perelman’s home base, at Parkwest Studios in Brooklyn, in October 2024. It is the first recording of this trio.
The album’s title captures its spirit, of constantly shapeshifting, multilayered musical dimensions, fractured yet interconnected. The music, as in all Perelman’s albums, was free improvised. Perelman suggests an emotional vibe; Sharp expands Perelman’s organic momentum with textural guitar manipulations that enrich the complex sonic architectures, and Baptista introduces subversive gibberish vocals and playful-theatrical rhythmic elements.
Perelman, Sharp, and Baptista keep constructing and deconstructing the six electroacoustic, labyrinthian geometric pieces with a restless need to exhaust the sonic possibilities of such an odd trio. They push these extended pieces into exploratory, unstable territories («Dionysus in the Amazon»), evoke mysterious, sensual dreeam («Sacred Geometry of the Tropics»), experiment with tropical, Brazilian themes («Inside a Broken Circle»), imagine a hallucinatory, ecstatic pulse («Electric Bacchanalia»), explore mutated, rhytmic geometries («Irregular Forms in Humid Space»), and conclude this journey with an intense and radical tropical celebration («Disordered Continuum»). The music never surrenders to familiar, predictable courses, but feels ancient and futuristic at the same time. Perelman, Sharp, and Baptista embrace their different sonic approaches, and know how to balance density and space, and tension and release. This trio sounds as if it is just beginning to explore its imaginative sonic potential.
Synesthesia is the third album of the New York-based free-improv meets free jazz quartet of Perelman, his most frequent collaborator, pianist Matthew Shipp, double bass player William Parker, and drummer Bobby Kapp (which Perelman calls «a survivor of the early 1960s free jazz scene»), following Heptagon (Leo, 2017) and Ineffable Joy (ESP-Disk, 2019). The album was recorded at Parkwest Studios in December 2024. The album’s title reflects Perelman’s approach, similar to Parker’s, of seeing sound as colours and shapes.
The album features five extended pieces that allow this quartet to develop its slow-cooking, organic sound and emphatic, collective interplay, like attentive sonic painters sharing a huge canvas that reflects their rich jazz-informed histories and experiences. Perelman sets the emotional, contemplative, and quite melancholic course of the pieces with a tenor sax that often sounds vulnerable and soft. Shipp introduces a cerebral dimension with complex, circular piano patterns and subtle melodic ideas that guide the loose pieces forward. Parker anchors the flow of the music with commanding, deep-toned double bass lines, and Kapp focuses on coloring its momentum with light cymbal work and pulses. The quartet’s careful, synesthetic dynamics refuse to engage in full-blown, ecstatic eruptions, and most of the time opt to find instant and resonant common ground.
Eyal Hareuveni
Ivo Perelman (tenor saxophone), Elliott Sharp (8-string electric guitar), Cyro Baptista (percussion, vocals), Matthew Shipp (piano), William Parker (double bass), Bobby Kapp (drums)
