Not your average Creative Sources releases, the father/son collaboration of Ernesto Rodrigues on viola and Guilherme Rodrigues on cello are joined by 2/3 of Red Trio — Hernani Faustino on double bass and Rodrigo Pinheiro on piano — with Pedro Carneiro on marimba, for an impressively active set of Swirling, Whirling and Twirling improvisations.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2020 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at Orquestra de Camara Portuguesa, in Alges, Portugal, on December 1st, 2019, by Pedro Carneiro.
"Another recent release from European musicians, again featuring piano (appearance of the latter having skipped the previous entry), and before moving on to a handful of items from elsewhere, is The Book of Spirals from another quintet around Ernesto Rodrigues - here joined by Rodrigo Pinheiro, Pedro Carneiro (marimba with quarter tone extension), Hernani Faustino and Guilherme Rodrigues for this December 2019 performance of three tracks totaling nearly an hour.
Following the percussive and almost jazzily frenetic at times Pentahedron (as recorded the month prior, and as discussed here last month), this is once again a relatively extroverted performance - as also marked by the participation of Faustino. And following on his performance with Lisbon String Trio amid the understated and shifting modal coloring of Rhetorica (discussed here in August 2019), Pinheiro is also rather more at the center of the action here - in particular together with Carneiro, the two forming something of a tempered and percussive backbone duo for the improvisations as a whole. (And I only know Carneiro from his relatively central role on the older Chant, an enigmatic quintet album around Joao Camoes - and like Pentahedron, also involving Zingaro:
The circle is completed, perhaps, by the even earlier Earnear, first discussed here in December 2015, from a trio with Pinheiro and Camoes joining LST's Miguel Mira....) Faustino then brings a broadly communicative and steady articulation to The Book of Spirals, balancing (perhaps) the contrapuntal timbre music of the Rodrigueses, the latter functioning more to fill and tilt textures around the piano-marimba backbone.... From there, the music often builds impressive momentum, with various runs and swells, evoking both wild and more urban settings, including by becoming more rhetorical or mysterious by the end. In that sense, and also like Pentahedron, it becomes more like a "free music" album of a prior vein than some of Rodrigues' own recent explorations focusing more thoroughly on timbre and infrachromaticism....
It does start strongly and creatively, though, as so many of these novel groupings seem to do, into kind of an unwinding and then various waves, including through more classical moods. Extended techniques are not absent either, as indicated e.g. by quarter-tone marimba, making for yet another intriguing (augmented) improvising string ensemble album from Creative Sources, in yet another novel formation. Indeed, The Book of Spirals is rather aggressive and even flashy at times (especially given that it doesn't involve horns), but tender or provocative (or even almost static and procedural) at others."-Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts