An impressive highly interactive and extended improvisation focused mostly on strings, with label leader Ernesto Rodrigues on viola, Guilherme Rodrigues on cello, plus Red Trio's Hernani Fasutino on double bass and legendary Portuguese violinist Carlo Zingaro, with Jose Oliveira adding active percussive interaction, captured live at the CreativeFest XIII in 2019.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2019 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded live during the CreativeFest XIII at O'Culto da Ajuda, in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 20th 2019, by Miguel Azguime.
"[...] In particular, the new string-focused quintet album Pentahedron, dating from CreativeFest XIII this past November, offers yet another collective interaction around a member of Red Trio: Bassist Hernâni Faustino had appeared elsewhere with Rodrigues, e.g. in Octopus on Mimus (as discussed here in January 2019), but he's much more a pole of the interaction on Pentahedron, to the point that I found myself spontaneously asking on first audition, "Wait, is that a bass solo?" In that sense, the music on Pentahedron is then rather more traditionally jazzy than e.g. that with the Lisbon String Trio (perhaps recalling some of the idioms from the first phase of Rodrigues' III Phases series, as coincidentally also noted here in January 2019) - such an impression being bolstered by the other musical pole on Pentahedron, Carlos Zingaro on violin. (Zingaro had of course already appeared with Rodrigues & LST on Theia, first discussed here in July 2018.... But the actual ensemble here, albeit around rather different formal investigations, is much more similar to the quintet with percussion around João Camões on Chant....)
There's thus very much a sense of (e.g. FMP) tradition, as well as an investigation of momentum - including somewhat uncharacteristically around groove - more generally, via almost a world-weary working-through, (at times) pace some traffic figures & extended string timbres, especially from the middle of the texture. (There's also a sense of completion that arrives several minutes prior to the real close to the proceedings, resulting in a more timbrally transformative approach being engaged, nonetheless soon coming to reconfigure around momentum again, before fading to close.... One might thus speak of two tracks, although the total album length remains under half an hour....) And those middle textures are, in part, where Rodrigues has been so transformative in general, here with Guilherme Rodrigues (cello) as well, in addition to José Oliveira on percussion - the latter generally taking a more traditionally rhythmic "accent" approach, after being absent from the Creative Sources catalog for quite some time, especially relative to his early involvement (during which Oliveira appeared on the first three albums released by the label - & on the first five to include Ernesto Rodrigues himself).
The result is that Pentahedron is relatively aggressive for much of its length, somewhat in keeping with e.g. the "concerto" style on Sediments with Gabriel Ferrandini on drums (as discussed here in December 2019), and certainly with the quasi-extroverted presentation on Rhetorica with Rodrigo Pinheiro on piano (as already discussed here in August 2019), such that it forms something of a set (i.e. around Red Trio) with those two (most recent, as it happens) LST issues. (That the participation of Faustino on bass would conflict with Alvaro Rosso of LST thus apparently figures this particular combination, although that's more about the way the bass specifically functions on Pentahedron: Generally adding another bassist to LST seems feasible to me, although it hasn't occurred....) Anyway, it doesn't seem that Pentahedron is especially innovative, at least compared to some of Rodrigues' other work, but it does make for an enjoyable, and presumably relatively approachable, release featuring more improvised string music in a virtuoso concert setting. Might it even be described as a crowd pleaser?"-Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts