José Lencastre & Marilyn Crispell
Two records. Buy them.
Saxophonist José Lencastre is a key figure on the Portuguese avant-garde scene. Unsurprisingly, he’s recorded more than once for the amazing Clean Feed label in that country, but he’s also one of the artists behind the collective Phonogram Unit.
In January 2021, only a few months after I’d started Burning Ambulance Music, he emailed me to say, “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.”
I listened to the three demos he sent and responded immediately, saying, “Wow, this is really terrific stuff, not at all what I expected. Funny that it arrives now, too, as I’m just starting to dive back into the work of Julius Hemphill, who was very big on multi-reed ensemble writing...”
We agreed to start working on an album. He only had about 30 minutes of music arranged for multiple saxophones (and electronics, courtesy of producer Ary), so we decided to add two more pieces edited from a live-in-the-studio duo for saxophone and live electronics, bringing the disc’s total running time to 43:29. The result was Inner Voices, a stunning album released in August 2022 that sounds like nothing else in José’s catalog, and nothing else on the label.
Here’s the music video for the opening piece, “Momena”:
Some of the music on Inner Voices sounds like the World Saxophone Quartet working with dub producer Adrian Sherwood; other pieces are like James Brandon Lewis jamming with Autechre. I guarantee you’ve never heard anything like it, and that’s the record I would most like you to buy from us this week.
The first batch of Leo Records titles I posted on their Bandcamp page included seven albums by pianist Marilyn Crispell, ranging from 1987’s Gaia and For Coltrane all the way up to 2018’s Dream Libretto. In 2019, I interviewed Crispell for DownBeat, and we talked about that album (among many other subjects):
In 2018, Crispell returned to her roots in modern composition for the album Dream Libretto. The five-part title piece is performed by Crispell, Tanya Kalmanovitch on violin and Richard Teitelbaum on electronics—a first in her work. “It’s a very simple piece, but I worked on it for five years ... . [E]very note is very transparent, so I would labor over what notes I wanted and I kept changing things,” she said.
It has a minimal, almost haunted, quality. Each note from the piano echoes into space, traced by high-pitched whines and almost imperceptibly low rumbles. The sorrow at its heart is deeply personal for the pianist and composer.
“I thought of it as a suite. And really, during the past four or five years, I lost a lot of people who were very close to me. I would say I was in a period of extended mourning, and this piece came out of that and was written for them, really. I paid for the whole thing myself, and it was just something that was very important for me to put out.”
“Dream Libretto” makes up one-half of the album; the rest is the seven-part “The River,” a series of piano-violin duos that’s every bit as beautiful as the opening suite. Anyone familiar with Crispell’s 1980s work, both solo and with Anthony Braxton, will be very pleasantly surprised by this album. That music was more explosive and clearly within the “avant-garde jazz” paradigm, while this is spacious, mournful, even haunted, but it has every bit of the force she always brings to the keyboard.
Buy Dream Libretto on Bandcamp.
On Friday, November 1, we’ll release 20 more Leo Records titles on Bandcamp: 10 by Anthony Braxton, five by Evan Parker, three by Mat Maneri, and two by Joe Morris. So look out for that announcement, and in the meantime dive into what’s already on the Leo Bandcamp page. See you next week!