"The passing of time can take on a variety of colors and inflections: Narrative is thus only ever provisionally linear. Different moments take on different affective qualities, some perhaps moving forward, some pointing back. Generations of musicians engage the sculpting of time then, not only in the moment of (perhaps improvisatory) musical performance, but also across the human realm, i.e. across lives and relations. For some, performances and articulations are always underway, in process.... So when Ernesto Rodrigues variously engages worlds beyond humanity, the worlds of creatures or ecological scenes or atomic phenomena, he is humanizing those worlds, i.e. articulating them sonically for himself, moreover with and for others, forging (sometimes ephemeral) relations: Creative Sources has then cultivated e.g. spectral music more generally, i.e. (natural) overtone relations subsuming the history of Western chromaticism and its twelve distinct tones - but also in terms of both Western instrumental practice and (often...) small collective bands or ensembles of musicians. Just as distinctions between different notes of traditional scales might blur (yielding to a distributed field of relations...), distinctions between different musicians, including the superficially different timbres of their instruments, might blur in performance as well.... Yet, fields of individual virtuosity do still (re)appear. And for this Not Bad quartet, an assemblage spanning three generations, individual virtuosity does indeed feature, including in traditionally free and jazzy solos, but also as an aspect of forging a coherent whole. The result before us, well over an hour of dense musical interaction, is thus more directly expressive than many Creative Sources albums, often featuring strong rhythmic coloring from one of the pioneers of the European Free Jazz scene, Gunter "Baby" Sommer of Dresden. Yet this melding of impulses and styles is not only about looking backward toward a legend of the previous generation, but forward as well: Ernesto is joined in this quartet performance by his son, Guilherme Rodrigues, only 34 years old, but the veteran of well over a hundred albums on Creative Sources and elsewhere, as well as by young Portuguese horn player, Goncalo Mortagua. (And it's not only the Rodrigueses forging this link with Sommer, but very much Mortagua as well. He initiated the session via teaching connections, and the two can frequently be found interlocked, in traditionally jazzy duo interactions, suggestive of one pole here....) And so, just as a septuagenarian called Baby already seems destined for a (paradoxical) play of generations, for their prior album together (again on Creative Sources, 2020), Goncalo and Guilherme appear themselves as (2 of) As 3 Velhas.... Such paradoxes might even broadly define something of the European improvising style per se, "paradoxes" of freedom seeming an especially Old World notion.... (A sort of conscious multidimensionality becomes an aspect of free music's affective contours, one might say. And for Baby and others, those dimensions embrace humor too.) But history isn't always inflected this way: Sommer himself confronts his own influences perhaps most explicitly (and linearly) on his 2013 solo album Dedications for Intakt, including his connection to Baby Dodds, i.e. in the distinct coloring of each beat of the rhythmic cycle. And Sommer does command the ensemble at times, virtuosically holding together a sort of free take on classic jazz already on "Verve," but only after a sort of arrhythmic timelessness can dominate portions of "Abertura." In many ways, the remainder of the album does reflect that opening, as the musicians continue to shift through different styles and perspectives, different plays of light. Indeed, soon Guilherme's probing held tone asks what is real or what is a dream, casting different spells, the ensemble sometimes shades into seemingly distant colors.... (So the term "spectral" can come to suggest its two meanings here, particularly as shifting tones trouble our sense of distinct "notes" - or temporalities.)

But the beginning, that sense of aperture (and perhaps unreality), followed by the traditional take on cacophonous jazz, is far from the full story. "Invocacao" consummates a strong "world vibe" next, not only an obvious inspiration for both Baby and Ernesto, but for "jazz" as an ongoing project in general: Here, e.g. flute soon pairs distinctively with mouth harp and then woodblocks - continuing to recall natural sounds themselves coloring human perception and so human music. (Later in the album there's also a nocturne, involving again quiet zoomimesis....) It can almost feel as if we're back in the 1960s (or actually, 70s...), including pace the suite of movements here: There's an overall sweep to the sequence (pace "progressive" albums...), but most tracks have their own formal complexities and narrative arcs too, rhythmic choreography sometimes bending, or even fading away... i.e. back to a sort of timbre music (of perhaps rubbing instead of striking, blurring instead of articulating intervals of time...). Or sometimes the drums are jazzily (or worldly...) assertive and in control. So time itself does come to take on different colors, inflecting forward and back, parsing different worlds, maybe going beyond.... That is, until - pending another pass through the urban scene - it seems that by "Letzter Wurf," Baby is ready to retire to the beach."-Todd M. McComb

This album has been reviewed on our magazine:


The Squid's Ear!