(Avant-Garde Jazz) Hugo Carvalhais (feat. Emile Parisien, Gabriel Pinto, Dominique Pifarely) - Particula - 2012, WEB, FLAC (tracks), lossless

After the success obtained by his debut CD, “Nebulosa”, a couple of years ago, expectations were high regarding the next step to be walked by Portuguese bassist and composer Hugo Carvalhais with his fixed trio, including pianist and synthesizer player Gabriel Pinto and drummer Mário Costa. Here it is, and fulfilling entirely our most ambitious desires. Now, in “Particula”, instead of the American saxophonist Tim Berne as special guest, we have two French musicians of similar importance: the soprano revelation Émile Parisien, member of Daniel Humair’s New Reunion Quartet and a frequent Carvalhais collaborator on stage, and violinist Dominique Pifarély, a regular Louis Sclavis companion. Together, they very rarely form a quintet – more often, we find in this recording a series of quartets, trios, duos and solos, always presenting fresh and defying associations between pre-established structures and improvisation. With this second opus, Carvalhais confirms all the assumptions we made about his future. Remember this name, because certainly more will come.

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Liner Notes:
This is the second CD by bassist/composer Hugo Carvalhais, whose debut Nebulosa appeared in 2010. Remarkably original work, Nebulosa included Carvalhais’ regular band-mates--pianist- keyboard player Gabriel Pinto and drummer Mário Costa--and featured alto saxophonist Tim Berne, mixing the trio’s often coolly architectural play and the New York veteran’s vocal intensity. It was a fascinating CD and as I listened to it, I found it avoiding classification. I had those nagging critic’s questions: what genre is it? Where does it fit in? There were melodies and changes, there was free improvisation, both linear and in the play of sounds.
It took hearing this second CD of Carvalhais’ music to realize his special quality. He creates music almost without genre, taking the available materials of contemporary music as his compositional palette and playing with presences and absences of structure and musical language to construct a special terrain which he and his cohorts both inhabit and bring into being, the group a kind of sonic potential.
Hugo is a native of Porto, a Northern Portuguese city that has its own Casa de Musica, one of the world’s most beautiful performance spaces and one largely devoted to radical music. First inspired by a fortuitous choice of records—Coltrane’s Sun Ship, by Bill Evans’ Trio ’64, Duke Ellington’s Money Jungle with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, and John Zorn and Fred Frith’s Art of Memory--Carvalhais took up the bass at 18 when he “was studying painting, but I was already addicted to bass and jazz. I kept thinking and studying jazz all day long. I’ve been doing it ever since then.”
He met the pianist Gabriel Pinto a couple of years later and they met Mário Costa in 2008. For Hugo, “The idea of having my own band came when the three of us got together. Since then the band has regularly expanded to a quartet with saxophonist Emile Parisien, a young virtuoso who has played with such distinguished musicians as Michel Portal and Daniel Humair.
Carvalhais’ group concept is very strong here, extending to the presence of the brilliant violinist, Dominique Pifarély. Hugo explains, “Dominique is a guest because he came to play with us for the first time and recorded the session during this period. However, I don’t see him as a guest musician on the record. I see him as an equal member of this musical piece, in the overall structure. I thought of all the record with his presence in mind.
“We have five musicians, but I don’t feel it as a normal quintet record. I prefer to think that I have 4 artists with me and I can have them playing in solo, duo, trio, quintet…whatever the compositions ask for. There are a lot of settings mixing all the possible formations. For example on “Amniotic” there is no bass and drums. There’s only me and Gabriel on “Cortex.”
It’s those kinds of choices that suggest Carvalhais’ freedom as a composer and group leader. He’s deeply curious about musical space—harkening back to his interest in visual arts and his frequent titles from the discipline of physics. He’s an architect of absence. You notice it in the particular choice of instruments—the way his spare bass occupies the lower register. He’s unusually articulate in first position (a knack that one might notice in another bassist-leader Dave Holland), but in the make-up of this particular band, it’s part of the sonic structure. Notice the narrow upper spectrum of soprano saxophone and violin—a distinctly structural choice that gives this music its openness—often leaving a central place free to the listener who can move around in the band, changing focus.
Carvalhais’ method opens up the musical space rather than enclosing it: “I hope it
sounds free and unpredictable. That’s what I’m trying to find…something related to the quality of real life. The bars only exist for the musicians to read; for the listener, it’s only pauses, breaths and affirmations. I give the musicians a road map or a frame with some written parts:
some endings, beginnings, some open structure, some moods as inspirations, some chords here and there as a point of departure or arrival. Sometimes I mix structure with unstructured parts coming in and out. It’s a mix of all this.”
In “Simulacrum” a composed melody appears in mid-piece and then as an
accompaniment to a piano improvisation. Hugo explains, “There is this composed melody that appears as a main theme or as accompaniment, or both–-it’s ambiguous. It can also appear in the improvisations and then go away. Maybe we can hear it from the beginning to the end.”
The balladic “Omega has a defined chord progression, but nobody beyond Gabriel knows when the chords change.”
Particula (“particle” in Latin) abounds in individualized sounds that also resonate with larger structures. For Carvalhais, “Flux” refers to the endless exchange of energy between everything in the universe. “Chrysalis” is an example of the transformation of matter. “Cortex” invokes “the human brain, another universe to discover.”
Taken as a whole, Carvalhais’ compositions form a journey into the cosmos of the
human, the infinitely small and large, the miracles of consciousness and measurement.
Testimony to the value of his approach is heard everywhere here. You can catch it in the inspired invention of individual contributions: in Pifarély’s eerily electronic probes on “Chrysalis”; in Pinto’s luminous clarity on “Omega”; in Parisien’s rapid, sputtering doubletonguing on “Amniotic”; in Costa’s vibrant sonic resource on “Generator”; and in Carvalhais’s own lyrical soliloquy at the beginning of “Simulacrum.”
More significant though is the shape and scale of the totality, the musicians’ continuous sense of creative exchange. The group concept gets stronger the longer the listener is immersed in it. The last two pieces are very different, yet they’re related by their very sound.
It’s as if “Generator” disappears and “Amniotic” appears, somehow the birth medium of the entire program arriving at its end, promising further change.
(Stuart Broomer)

Hugo Carvalhais - double bass
Emile Parisien - soprano saxophone
Gabriel Pinto - piano
Dominique Pifarély - violin
Mário Costa - drums