Released just three weeks apart in October, two new recordings by Rodrigo Amado represent an embarrassment not of riches but meanings and values, in a world seemingly tearing itself apart. As different as they are, each is a masterpiece. Both recorded in mid-2023 in Lisbon, they also share very rare and contradictory qualities. Each resonates strongly with the character of certain great 1960s music: that is, a collective passion that initially surmounts formal constraints, then breaks through to create ultimately original formal structures. Simultaneously, each feels as immediate as this week’s (November 4 to 10, 2024) headlines, whether it’s a flood in Valencia, an election in America, an ongoing invasion in Ukraine, or an unnameable and terrible mystery of genocides in Gaza and random stabbings in too many other places to keep track. These musics are benedictions, sometimes harsh, sometimes light-filled, always intense, musics of large and transcendent feelings, a sonic equivalent to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy .
The Attic (Rodrigo Amado, Gonçalo Almeida, Onno Govaert) and Eve Risser - La Grande Crue (No Business, 2024)
Its gritty intensity is declared immediately in Almeida’s barbwire arco , something that will be matched by Govaert’s multi-directional explosions and Amado’s tenor, his sound, at once both full and mobile, resembling that of Coltrane during his last years (the sound announced on the summit that was Meditations), when the bright metallic harmonics rolled off for a warm roundness wedded to an intense, variable and taut vibrato. Along with Amado’s shifting sound, sometimes from air to Getz to gravel in a matter of seconds, there is also a surfeit of light in the music, manifesting in a stream of meticulous detail to which everyone contributes. Risser is a pianist of genius and empathy (evident since the trio CD En Corps with Benjamin Duboc and Edward Perraud [Dark Tree, 2012]) and finds varied and distinct approaches on every track, including a percussive upper register that can resemble a xylophone.
The track titles, in French, emphasize existential fundamentals: “Corps” (body), “Peau” (skin), “Phrase” (sentence), “Pierre” (stone). The physical design of the CD package represents profound reflection, even generations of reflection. The jacket illustrations are paintings by Amado’s late father, the distinguished Manuel Amado: they depict architectural interiors that have filled with water: a blank-eyed sculpture of a woman invoking antiquity appears in water; a white architectural column, similarly immersed, casts a dark shadow. There’s a poem by Portuguese poet Nuno Júdice, “Angle”, from his book Jeu de Reflets that serves as liner note, appearing in both French and English. Each track title is the last word in each of the last four lines in sequence. The book’s illustrations came from the same series of paintings, La Grande Crue (“The Great Flood”) by Manuel Amado, that supplies the images on the liner booklet as well as the CD title. The first line of “Angle” is “A luminous reflection dies on the waters of summer.” Along with leading the four movements of the CD, Rodrigo Amado, also the CD’s designer, has created monument, memorial and symphony.
David Maranha/ Rodrigo Amado - Wrecks (Nariz Entupido, 2024)
While one can easily go astray conflating a music’s meanings with current events, Bernardo Devlin’s liner essay for Wrecks forcefully ties its mood to the present state of world affairs:
And people, could you believe your luck to bear witness of the edgings of a system slipping through the cracks of its own making? Jokes on EU leaders abounded as Uncle Sam's prophecies tormented somebody's sleep one night and Havana syndrome appeared on the mainstream news. Further in the east things didn't look brilliant either and they were coming closer. North and south, poles were really melting and the Doomsday Clock had ran past it's time. Communications were being shut. What to do?
That aside, however, wrecks aren’t always a bad thing. This Wrecks is a continuous meditation of 44:09 during which Amado on tenor saxophone and David Maranha on electric organ construct a roaring, pulsing wall of sound, sometimes modal, often multi-modal, continuously fractured and refractive. It’s an explosion in a cathedral (to borrow an Alejo Carpentier title) in which the ecstasies of the orderly (traditionally majestic church music, clarion sound and modal reveries) combine with the ecstasies of chaos (sounds compounding into noise and layers of dissonance).
Wrecks begins quietly with a reflective saxophone gradually surrounded by scattered electric sounds and a rising drone. Soon there are fractured polyphonics, circular runs that touch the tenor’s high and low extremes, but that can turn rapidly to elegiac melody amidst the rising, thickening, bruising wall of the organ and electronics that can suggest scraped steel. At times, in the meditative moments particularly, the sounds of the two musicians will merge in a synergy of the human and the machine.
Amado pauses briefly around the 36-minute mark after a sustained reverie, leaving Maranha’s dense modal compound alone, only to return around the 39-minute mark, re-entering with a sustained high-pitch then gradually developing a final oration built largely around a single determined phrase that gradually moves from rough to sweet, a phrase that ultimately repeats against Maranha’s machine song.
A departure from Amado’s highly interactive, usually acoustic trios and quartets, Wrecks might be the most powerful recording to appear this year, a brilliant fusion of impassioned lyricism and holy noise.
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