Featuring: Rodrigo Amado
Gonçalo Almeida - double bass
Rodrigo Amado - tenor saxophone
Marco Franco - drums
| 1. Shadow | 12:24 |
| 2. Hole | 7:56 |
| 3. Spring | 10:06 |
| 4. Board | 16:24 |
| 5. Nail | 5:12 |
Stewart Smith - THE QUIETUS
Portugal’s avant-jazz scene continues to surprise and delight. Recorded in the loft space at SMUP, a pioneering arts venue in the Lisbon satellite of Paredes, The Attic brings together three of the country’s finest improvising musicians: bassist Gonçalo Almeida, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, and drummer Marco Franco. Amado’s star is on the rise, following 2015’s excellent This Is Our Language with Joe McPhee, Kent Kessler and Chris Corsano, and last year’s superb offering from his own Motion Trio. He’s a generous collaborator, and The Attic is as much Almeida and Franco’s show, with the bassist’s elegant and powerful playing often setting the scene.
‘Shadow’ opens with a beautiful bowed solo. Playing in the instrument’s higher register, Almeida teases out elegant melodic phrases, shaded with darker double stops. There’s a beautiful clarity and light to this piece, with its modal harmonies giving rise to lines that remind me at times of European folk forms and minimalism. Amado plays the tenor in a pinched altissimo that sounds uncannily like a stopped trumpet, but for the fluidity of the steps, adding to music’s heightened sense of otherness. By the end, he’s making like Pharoah Sanders at his most blissful, giving a spiritual jazz sermon from some holy mountain.
If Franco is a subtle presence on the quieter tracks, his colouristic approach takes on a fauvist intensity on ‘Board’, where he scurries around the kit, firing off short fills and accents over a free pulse. Combined with Almeida’s rock solid bass strut, it gives the music a non-linear momentum, so it breathes and flexes, rather than tearing off in a single direction. ‘Nail’ comes in hard, with Amado blowing in a classic free jazz style over Almeida’s dark and woody bass. Franco’s drums crash, rumble and splash, but his light touch ensures each hit lands with a gymnast’s agility, rather than a blunt force. Amado alternates between high, strangulated tones and guttural honks, filling the gaps with cheeky staccato triplets. Yet while some saxophonists would deliver such sounds with macho volume and blare, Amado plays them with a subtler, rounded tone. He’s authoritative but never domineering, serving the collective improvisation.
Franpi Barriaux - Citizen Jazz
We left Rodrigo Amado just a few months ago with a declaration of independence. Desire and Freedom, he shouted with his faithful Motion Trio where Miguel Mira's cello acts as bass. We know the Lusitanian saxophonist is as attached to a certain tradition of free jazz as to improvisation at the heart of a moving triangle. But, while with his usual trio the tenor is naturally carried forward, a virulent scout who clears the ground, the configuration of the three improvisers who offer The Attic on the Lithuanian label NoBusiness is perfectly egalitarian. Of course, on the raw "Hole", Amado's angry growl makes everything tremble in its path. But the palpable, stifling, almost blunt tension that reigns within the rhythmic base does not fail to put everything back on the table, between the bursts of Marco Franco 's snare drum and the furtive slaps on the strangled strings of Gonçalo Almeida 's double bass .
In the Lisbon attic of SMUP Parede, one of the major venues for our music in the Portuguese capital, the young double bass player is the one who impresses the most. Having been based in the Netherlands for many years, he has mostly been seen with artists from Northern Europe, even if he rubs shoulders with his compatriot Susana Santos Silva in Lama. His discography with his string companions, whether it be his alter-ego Wilbert De Joode ( Live at Atelier Tarwewijk ) or the cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm ( Space Invaders ), suggested a great soloist. The almost solemn introduction of "Shadow", where the bow probes dark and buried thoughts, calls for vigilance. This musician already counts for a lot in the European free scene, but his generosity, tested by the bubbling of "Board", is limitless. In this long piece, he contains the obsessive ardor of two frank fighters, and that is no small feat.
It must be admitted that alongside Amado, Franco is not to be outdone. The playing is dense and yet without emphasis. Even on "Nail" which drives the nail deep into the flesh, releasing screams and fits of anger, the drums are never the artificers of chaos. Marco Franco, who has worked extensively with Luis Vicente, is neither constrained nor corseted: on the contrary, he is free, driven by a share of collective responsibility that everyone in the orchestra respects. The Attic is both a declaration of independence and belonging. The first is immediately heard. As for the second, it fits brilliantly into the wake of figures like Joe McPhee, John Edwards or Chris Corsano. This is Our Language Amado recently affirmed. He confirms it here, with a keen sense of formula.
