A suite in seven parts named in Latin with abstract spiritual connotations from the Portuguese free improvising trio of Paulo Galao on clarinet & bass clarinet, Guilherme Rodrigues on cello, and Nuno Morao on percussion, each movement using subdued yet detailed and active motion, a confident and adept meditation of powerfully controlled communion.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2018 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at Scratch Built Studio, in Lisbon, Portugal, on January 5th, 2016, by John Klima.
"The titles of the themes are in Latin, the last being referenced in S. John, and inside the cover the motto of what is on the CD is given poetically: "So that your servants may, / with loosened voices, / Resound the wonders "It is not clear who St. John is. Is it the Baptist, who the canons claim to have baptized Jesus and written the Book of Revelation? Is he the Evangelist? The Ethiopian martyr? It will not be important to understand the music - what is most relevant is the fact that it runs as a suite, the seven parts (a number that the occult connotes with the Absolute) conjugating in a praise to God. Christian in appearance, though from the compositional rules of Christian church music what we hear only retains one, the liturgical factor.
Improvised music by its very nature is profane, but in "Hymn" every single sound and every combination of the instruments used (soprano and bass clarinets, cello, percussion) seem measured, intentional, definitive, as if to try to counteract the ephemerality of improvisation, that which in itself was fixed by the registry of what Paulo Galão, Guilherme Rodrigues and Nuno Morão played on January 5, 2016 in the studio Scratch Built. It is also a personal and joint meditation, in a going-beyond-which is as spiritual as organic, especially when the functional viscerality of the human body is mimicked (listen to the clarinet in "Solve Polluti", for example). The three musicians find in their own humanity the motives for this devotional act, and in this they contradict some of the essential postulates of Christianity, although they do not move far from it. Another reason more ground makes listening to what is here essential: if Galão has been changing frequently the clarinets for the saxophone tenor for two years, in this disc we find it still with these murmurs, recorded at the time when - for our happiness - returned to full musical activity, after a few years of (almost) absence."-Rui Eduardo Paes, Jazz.PT (translated by Google)