Wrecks by David Maranha / Rodrigo Amado (2024) and La Grande Crue by The Attic & Eve Risser (2024)
Bill Meyer
“My roots are in my record player.” Those words, attributed to Evan Parker, appear on a t-shirt produced by Atavistic Records, a now-defunct, Chicago-based label that did yeoman’s service introducing listeners to unearthed musical treasures via its Unheard Music Series. Rodrigo Amado can probably relate. The Portuguese tenor saxophonist is part of a scene in Lisbon whose personal connections cohered in record stores. In the 1990s, when Amado managed a Fnac megastore, he hired Pedro Costa to help run its jazz department. A few years later Costa invited Amado to play on what became the first release by his ultra-productive Clean Feed label. Costa also went on to run another store, Trem Azul, which gave Lisbon’s upcoming free players, many of who would record for the label, a location where they could rehearse and perform.
Amado has gone on to be, like Clean Feed, ultra-productive, issuing several records a year. The majority chart the evolution of his burgeoning posse of combos, which include musicians from both Lisbon and abroad. The saxophonist’s music arises solely from free improvisation; he ceded leadership of the Humanization Quartet, the only band he’s in that plays tunes, to guitarist Luís Lopes in order to keep his concept clear. Depending on who is playing with Amado, the music might take the form of wooly, full-on free jazz or less idiomatic modes of improvisation, but Amado’s instrumental voice brings similar strengths to any context. He combines spontaneous creativity with a gravitational attraction to form, which means that his melodies are insistent and his long passages coherent, even as the other musicians contribute substantial influence over the music’s development. His tone and phrasing fuse bulk and agility.
While both of the CDs under consideration are freely improvised encounters with a one-of-a-kind keyboardist, their sound worlds are quite distinct. La Grande Crue is a studio encounter between The Attic, Amado’s ongoing trio with Amsterdam-based drummer Onno Govaert and Lisbon-born, Rotterdam-based bassist Gonçalo Almeida, and French pianist Eve Risser. Wrecks, on the other hand, debuts Amado’s duo with organist David Maranha.
When players improvise music together out of whole cloth, it’s possible for them to acquire collective habits. Adding guest to established combos is one way that Amado keeps them evolving. The Attic has released three previous recordings. On the last, Love Ghosts, the trio’s improvisations last between twelve and sixteen minutes, each of which builds from unhurried explorations of refracted tempos and complimentary timbres to a more muscular engagement in which tenor and drums seem to be pushing against one another while the bassist sustains the course. Risser’s presence on La Grande Crue brings some immediate changes to the group’s interactions. Her first statement establishes two sides to her technique. She’s a fluent and ensemble-minded player, as evidenced by the spare notes she articulates with her right hand, which create an open space where the other players can operate. But she also uses preparations as an integral part of her playing, which introduces a sort of tonal slipperiness. Sometimes a single note within a line or chord asserts a different attack or decay from its fellows, inducing subtle disorientation by placing percussive micro-disruptions into otherwise flowing phrases. Other times, an inside-the-piano flourish hurls a bolt of raked sound through the rest of the group’s duck and weave dynamics. Almeida never really cedes his role as the ensemble’s agent of forward momentum, but Govaert moves to the peripheries, either discretely commenting or tossing in chunks of fractured, tumbling rhythm. Amado approaches the action differently than he does with the trio, holding back a bit and surfacing out of the other player’s exchanges. He seems to be trusting the collective imagination, and it doesn’t let him down. The album closes on promising note of abstraction. The fourth track, “Pierre,” is less linear and more tense than anything else on the record, suggesting that the music has room for further development. For The Attic, La Grande Crue feels like a new chapter that finishes with an ellipsis. To be continued…
While the harmonic and rhythmic aspects of Risser’s playing with The Attic’s relate to jazz, even when the specific content does not, Maranha’s past collaborations with Stephan Mathieu, Richard Youngs, and Helena Espvall place him well outside the perimeter of jazz camp. His playing on Wrecks is like an eraser, smudging away anything idiomatic save that which Amado plays himself. Instead of working with pulse or space, Maranha generates a continuous sound that is nonetheless full of change. Amado doubtless knew this about him beforehand, so his opening gambit — a long-held note, followed by several more, each longer and more distressed — feels like an invitation to his partner to step on board and get to work. He doesn’t need nudging, but sets to work, first deploying layers of sound and then scoring their surface with rough thrusts and notes that corrode and crumble. While Maranha establishes a surface, Amado seems to ascend, casting curling lines over the organ’s grinding sonorities. With Risser and the Attic, Amado often sounds like he’s completing a configuration; here, he’s complementarily unconnected, pushing up the sky while Maranha churns the earth. There’s no reluctance in his raw, rippling fulminations. While the two musicians never lock into each other’s playing, that doesn’t mean they aren’t listening. Each seems to adjust the density and coarseness of his attack to complement his counterpart’s so that they seem to be vibrating sympathy with each other. If the saxophonist has ever played in such a setting before, I don’t know about it, but the two players seem ready to keep the partnership going; they’ve since reunited, with at least one festival gig looming in late summer 2025.
Bill Meyer lives near Chicago, where he attends a lot of concerts. He writes for The Wire, Dusted, Downbeat, Magnet, We Jazz, and the Chicago Reader.
