«The Ocean Inside a Stone» is the second album of Portuguese, Stockholm-based trumpeter, Susana Santos Silva, with her Portuguese quintet Impermanence. True to the title of this group, the music suggests a sense of urgency and distress of our nowadays urban lives, fully aware of the impermanence of all sentient beings, as the attached poem emphasizes:

The Past Yet To Come is here now. Impermanent.
Feeding us of Sweet Delusions. Pregnant of ideas.
Pregnant of Wanderhopes. We are here now.
Hoping for the Expanded Life The Drums Are Singing.
Or Is It The Trees? Or is it the Ocean?
The Ocean, Says The Healer. The Ocean Inside a Stone.

The Impermanence quintet – Santos Silva adds voice and tin whistle to her trumpet, reeds player João Pedro Brandão, pianist Hugo Raro, drummer Marcos Cavaleiro and Swedish bass player Torbjörn Zetterberg – was founded five years ago when Santo Silva was invited to perform by Porta-Jazz and the Guimarães Jazz Festival. The personnel remains the same as the one that recorded the self-titled debut album (Carimbo Porta-Jazz, 2015), but on «The Ocean Inside a Stone» Raro focuses on the synthesizer and Zetterberg switched from double bass to electric bass, so the sonic envelope gravitates into muscular and energetic, art-rock.
Santos leads this quintet with natural charisma, embracing the contradictions and constant sonic detours of this highly articulate and resourceful jazz quintet that plays abstract and sometimes chaotic and brutal, rock-tinged music. The restless seven-parts suite flows with great passion and evocative ideas, or as Santos Silva says it: «The beautiful in a liquid state, the ritual of the ordinary, the violent but ephemeral chaos, the poetics of absurdity and human fragility, the lightness of the ethereal and the abstract, the sublimation of the present define this transcendent, utopian, intangible and unimaginable world». You can feel vision materializes in «Wanderhopes», highlighting a poetic and free-associative dialog between Santos Silva and Brandãoor in the title-piece, charged by Brandão with addictive sensual energy or in the festive, Brazilian-tinged «The Drums Are Chanting, Or Is It The Trees?» Santos Silva summarizes best the compassionate, inclusive spirit of this album with the beautiful, closing ballad «The Healer».

Eyal Hareuveni 

Susana Santos Silva (tp, v, tin whistle), João Pedro Brandão (as, fl, choir), Hugo Raro (p, synth, choir), Torbjörn Zetterberg (b, v, qraqeb), Marcos Cavaleiro (dr)