The Attic & Eve Risser - La Grande Crue

2024

The fourth album of Portuguese tenor sax hero Rodrigo Amado’s free improvising trio The Attic – with fellow Portuguese double bass master Gonçalo Almeida and Dutch drummer Onno Govaert – offers an inspired, poetic meeting with French pianist-composer Eve Risser (whose work was documented by Portuguese labels such as Clean Feed and JACC). La Grande Crue (The Great Flood) was recorded at Timbuktu Studios in Lisbon in July 2023, when Risser performed in Jazz em Agosto with her Red Desert Orchestra. The album is framed by a beautiful poem by Portuguese writer-poet Nuno Júdice, who passed away in March 2024, and a cover painting by the same name of Amado’s father, Manuel Amado, one of his generation’s most important Portuguese painters.

The titles of the four pieces – «Corps» (Body), «Peau» (Skin), «Phrase» (Sentence) and «Pierre» (rock) correspond with Júdice’s poem «ANGLE» (from the book «Jeu de Reflets», with paintings by Manuel Amado). Amado encourages total freedom and the extended, improvised pieces slowly gravitate toward their cohesive, instant compositional outlines. Amado flows with beautiful, touching ideas and alternates between lyrical and introspective modes and commanding, urgent and soulful, stormy outbursts. Almeida – in his pizzicato and arco playing – and Govaert offer free pulses, at times simply ornamenting and coloring the music with delicate, nuanced touches more than harnessing it into rhythmic patterns, but both also push Amado into stratospheric flights with hypnotic, propulsive drive. Risser adds an unpredictable, brilliant dimension to the telepathic, ever-explorative deep rapport of The Attic and proves that she is a perfect partner for such a free-spirited session. She intervened with precise, concise comments of her idiosyncratic lexicon, altering or provoking the course of the music with an incisive, evocative idea and then testing its effect before joining again with another immediate, spontaneous idea.

Magically, these gifted, wise improvisers find a perfect balance and the new, ad-hoc collective sounds bigger than its sums, making its music rich – or flooded – by poetic, spiritual dynamics and arresting. melodic themes. A true masterpiece of free improvisation and one of the best albums of 2024.

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