José Lencastre

Buy this CD, get a free mixtape!

I want to sell every single one of you reading today’s newsletter a copy of José Lencastre’s album Inner Voices. So before I even tell you about what an amazing record it is, I’m gonna make you a very special offer, exclusive to readers of this newsletter.

Buy a copy of the actual physical CD, and when I receive the email from Bandcamp confirming your purchase, I will email you a link to download a one-hour mixtape curated from my personal Bandcamp collection. It runs the gamut from solo flute to skull-crushing death metal and I guarantee there is something on there you have never heard and which will blow your mind. I’ll even include a track listing complete with Bandcamp links, so you can purchase any of the music that appeals to you. How’s that for a deal?

Those who know, know that Portugal has an extraordinarily vibrant avant-garde jazz scene. The Clean Feed label launched in 2001 and has been documenting much of this music ever since. But there are other intriguing labels in Portugal as well, like Phonogram Unit, which is an artist-run imprint co-led by saxophonist José Lencastre and others.

In January 2021, José emailed me to say, “I remember seeing some time ago that Burning Ambulance will start releasing records. I’m almost finishing a solo album where I record all the parts, usually 2 altos and 2 tenors. I still don’t have a label for these compositions so I thought I would show some of them to you just in case you find them interesting for release. (They are not mastered yet.)”

I was very interested. Even in rough demo form, I could tell that he was doing something different from, say, the World Saxophone Quartet or ROVA. I wrote back and offered to release the record later that year, and he told me more about the music’s gestation:

“This project started last August when I went to visit my girlfriend’s parents in the south of Italy. I didn’t take the sax, so I had the idea of composing something for the horn… I composed four tunes while I was there. Then when I returned to Lisbon I thought of adding some others I had written during the first lockdown. (The only positive aspect of this pandemic is that it gave me the chance and the time to compose more on a regular basis…)”

The album came together a track or two at a time over a period of several months. I was worried at one point, because it seemed like only about a half hour of music, not enough for an album. I told José, “30 minutes is a little short; is it possible to expand the tracks to 5-6 minutes each so we end up with 40-45 minutes of music? Since layering and repetition are already such a large part of the process, it would be basically like doing extended remixes of what you’ve already got... Or perhaps you could do the 8 short tracks, and then contrast them with a single long (10-15 minute) solo piece with very little processing or layering, just maybe some reverb and effects.”

He responded, “Perhaps option 2 is better — that’s more or less what I had in mind. I was going to edit some minutes (10-15 is fine) from a solo improv I did with just effects from the producer… we did it in real time so I was reacting to the way he was manipulating the sound. I believe it would work as a nice contrast like you mentioned.”

Ultimately, that’s what he did. Inner Voices is divided into two halves: eight short pieces featuring strong melodies and overdubbed horns with some electronics and production effects from José’s friend Ary, and two longer tracks — the nearly 16-minute “Whale Talk” and the almost six-minute “Moonlit Meadows” — that were live-in-studio sax-and-electronics improvisations.

Once it was recorded, and I.A. Freeman’s brilliantly enigmatic cover art had been designed, the release took a long time to get physically manufactured. Back in 2021 and 2022, for obvious reasons, production times slowed to a crawl — it could take six months to get CDs back from the printer. Meanwhile, in 2025, the most recent Burning Ambulance releases, Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez’s Mama Killa and Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley’s Flashing Spirits, took six weeks.

Inner Voices finally came out in August 2022. I had no money for a publicist and no press contact list to speak of back then, but I did manage to get the album reviewed in a few places.

Spencer Tomson, who was familiar with José’s other work, wrote in The Wire, “these pieces capture the boisterousness of the recently released Magma (with Felipe Zenícola and João Valinho) and Affinity Suite (with Ernesto Rodrigues, Miguel Mira, Hernâni Faustino and João Lencastre). With Ary’s production of his collaborator-free pieces, Lencastre’s intensity is delivered intoxicating and pure. ‘Momena’ opens the record with an immediately spiky tone as overlaid sax lines clash and repel in the mixture while ‘Vidente Espiritual’ sets up manic rising cadences as though extracting a Shepard tone from inside an anxious horn.”

(A Shepard tone is an auditory illusion where a tone seems to be rising when it is in fact remaining steady. I had to look it up.)

Avant Music News also wrote about it, saying, “a large portion of Inner Voices resembles chamber music more than jazz. It is playful yet technically sophisticated, with a few memorable hooks as well as a nice chunk of compelling dissonance. The last twenty minutes are open-ended and experimental.”

Inner Voices is a beautiful album: eerie, hypnotic, unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Imagine a collaboration between Julius Hemphill and Adrian Sherwood and you’re in the neighborhood. Even three years after its release, it sounds like music from the future. So buy a CD (and get a free mixtape with it), won’t you?

One more thing: I Care If You Listen, a site that mostly covers classical music, published a fantastic review of the Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez album Mama Killa this week. Vanessa Ague writes, “The music’s fluidity is largely possible because of the trio’s ease of communication. Though each musician has their own distinctive background, when combined, the music feels less like a mosaic and more like a true blend of voices, forms, and styles. Each riff flies off the last, jumping from one musician to the next. Mendoza and fluke-mogul are frequent collaborators, and here, their instruments are so in sync they become nearly indistinguishable. There’s also a keen patchwork of rhythm, often held down by the delicate back-and-forth between fluke-mogul’s violin and Pérez’s complex drum patterns, like on ‘Amazing Graces,’ which zig zags between haunted violin tremolos and laid-back rhythms.” Read the whole thing.

If you’re a free subscriber, today’s newsletter ends here. Come back on Tuesday, when we’ll be discussing five notable jazz albums. If you’re a paying subscriber, keep reading for articles on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, David Bowie and those who rank albums for pay/clicks, Nazis in South America, and deep time.