Three expansive and stunning performances at Centro Cultural de Vila Flor as part of the Guimaraes Jazz 2020 festival by drummer and percussionist Pedro Melo Alves' expanded 23-piece Omniae Ensemble directed by Pedro Carneiro, adding electronics, voice and a diverse orchestration that gives his band both power but also flexibility to express an astonishing array of moods.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2021 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded live by Joao Bessa at Centro Cultural de Vila Flor, Guimaraes, on the 22nd of November 2020, Part of Guimaraes Jazz 2020, by invitation of Ivo Martins. Edited by Pedro Melo Alves. Mixed and mastered by Joao Bessa.
" "We sure are alive", writes Pedro Melo Alves in the liner notes of Lumina. It's true, the music inside is a survival chant: we made it, after two years of a science fiction-like nightmare. And suddenly, there's some light. The Portuguese composer and drummer was the winner in 2016 of the Bernardo Sassetti Award with the first version of his Omniae Ensemble concept. At the invitation of the Guimaraes Jazz Festival in 2020, during a brief interval between lockdowns, he transformed the original septet to a 23-elements large ensemble, adding electronics, tuba, clarinet, flutes, bassoon, cello, classical guitar, three singers and a maestro (Pedro Carneiro, also known as a percussionist in both the contemporary classical and improvised music fields) to the original mix and writing new, defying and more inclusive, in terms of vocabularies and grammars, scores for it. "How do we even start to look for all that ungraspable light?", Melo Alves asks. Well, this is how."-Clean Feed
"On the burgeoning Portuguese jazz scene, drummer Pedro Melo Alves is becoming one of the more prolific artists. The multiple award-winning composer has accumulated international praise for four unique recordings in the space of a year. On Lumina he has extended his existing ensemble and assembled the Omniae Large Ensemble of twenty-two musicians for a project commissioned by the Guimarães Jazz Festival.
Melo Alves' Clean Feed Records debut was a quartet outing (with vocalists), In Igma (2020), a demanding and rewarding avant-garde experiment. His Omniae Ensemble, in smaller and larger configurations, is a bridge between jazz, free improvisation, and classical elements. Lumina features three extended pieces, each in constant motion. At over a half-hour, "Ubi" is typical of Melo Alves' loose constructions floating around central themes. Eerie passages and disembodied voices drift through sometimes intense infernos of sound. "Phelia" is more instrument-focused. Multiple percussionists, Mané Fernandes' guitar, José Diogo Martins' piano, and a quartet of vocalists act alone or mingle before drifting away on a gentle wave of bells. The concluding twenty-plus-minute "Onirea" brings the ensemble sections together more frequently, sometimes at dizzying speeds. It is a piece whose density contrasts nicely with its spaciousness.
Melo Alves speaks of "omniae" as the space in a formless whole. A difficult concept to grasp on paper but one that comes to life in the ensemble music of Lumina. The album was recorded live at Centro Cultural Vila Flor in Guimarães, Portugal in late 2020. It is a fascinating new music suite, often orchestral in its scope but finely nuanced, and at times, minimal. The rhythmic pulse is often unhurried but recurrently, with a menacing tension waiting to break free. Melo Alves is dedicated to both curiosity and tradition equally, and here he dares to express his ideas in a new language."-Karl Ackermann, All ABout Jazz