Featuring: Rodrigo Amado
Rodrigo Amado - tenor saxophone
Gonçalo Almeida - double bass
Onno Govaert - drums
Eve Risser - piano
Top 10 Album of 2024 -- The Free Jazz Collective Blog
Eyal Hareuveni - Salt Peanuts
The fourth album of Portuguese tenor sax hero Rodrigo Amado’s free improvising trio The Attic – with fellow Portuguese double bass master Gonçalo Almeida and Dutch drummer Onno Govaert – offers an inspired, poetic meeting with French pianist-composer Eve Risser (whose work was documented by Portuguese labels such as Clean Feed and JACC). La Grande Crue (The Great Flood) was recorded at Timbuktu Studios in Lisbon in July 2023, when Risser performed in Jazz em Agosto with her Red Desert Orchestra. The album is framed by a beautiful poem by Portuguese writer-poet Nuno Júdice, who passed away in March 2024, and a cover painting by the same name of Amado’s father, Manuel Amado, one of his generation’s most important Portuguese painters.
The titles of the four pieces – «Corps» (Body), «Peau» (Skin), «Phrase» (Sentence) and «Pierre» (rock) correspond with Júdice’s poem «ANGLE» (from the book «Jeu de Reflets», with paintings by Manuel Amado). Amado encourages total freedom and the extended, improvised pieces slowly gravitate toward their cohesive, instant compositional outlines. Amado flows with beautiful, touching ideas and alternates between lyrical and introspective modes and commanding, urgent and soulful, stormy outbursts. Almeida – in his pizzicato and arco playing – and Govaert offer free pulses, at times simply ornamenting and coloring the music with delicate, nuanced touches more than harnessing it into rhythmic patterns, but both also push Amado into stratospheric flights with hypnotic, propulsive drive. Risser adds an unpredictable, brilliant dimension to the telepathic, ever-explorative deep rapport of The Attic and proves that she is a perfect partner for such a free-spirited session. She intervened with precise, concise comments of her idiosyncratic lexicon, altering or provoking the course of the music with an incisive, evocative idea and then testing its effect before joining again with another immediate, spontaneous idea.
Magically, these gifted, wise improvisers find a perfect balance and the new, ad-hoc collective sounds bigger than its sums, making its music rich – or flooded – by poetic, spiritual dynamics and arresting. melodic themes. A true masterpiece of free improvisation and one of the best albums of 2024.
Ken Waxman - Jazz Word
Constantly seeking new challenges, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, one of Portugal’s most accomplished improvisers, often does so by playing with new associates ranging from Joe McPhee to Alexander von Schippenbach. La Grande Crue adds innovative French pianist Eve Risser to the already constituted Attic trio, filled out by Dutch drummer Onno Govaert and Portuguese bassist Gonçalo Almeida.
La Grande Crue’s four tracks are given a richer texture by Risser’s pianism which isolates staccato key progression, soundboard echoes, unexpected decorations and linear patterning with the same finesse. Her experience encompasses small group improvisations and large ensemble compositions, with forays into Rock-like power and lyrical impressionism avoiding fissure as well.
As in past trio sessions, Govaert and Almeida provide the equilibrium that cements the ongoing sound explorations. Even if the saxophonist and pianist approach unbridled frenetic motifs, the two rhythm players provide a grounded influence. The drummer specializes in cymbal splashes, bass drum rumbles and thick ruffs, while the bassist resonates back-and-forth thumps with the odd spiccato arco swill. Thus Risser’s occasional keyboard stabs and umps Amado’s altissimo squeaks and triple tonguing can evolve without the sequences abandoning linear movement.
“Peau” offers the most expressive story telling with Riser’s inserted and interjected key plinks and pops setting up a dialogue with Amado’s sharp bites and flattement, leading to sequences of passionate near swing. Meanwhile the extended “Phrase” has an alternating staccato and smooth theme introduction that links strummed inner piano strings with moderated reed flutters and reflux as the saxophonist builds up an elongated response that bounces from intense squeaks to reflective stutters. Eventually calm is affiliated with creativity. Highlighting equivalent dynamism from all four, the piece reaches a dramatic climax of patterned completion.
