| Portuguese violinist Carlos “Zíngaro” is committed to reinventing chamber music through improvisation. Consider some of his past collaborations – in duo with Joelle Léandre, Dominique Pifarely, Peggy Lee, Peter Kowald, Derek Bailey, and Dominic Duval; in trio with Tom Cora and percussionist Roger Turner, Fred Lonberg-Holm and electronics explorer Lou Mallozzi, and with Hans Reichel and clarinetist Rudiger Carl; or in quartet with Elliott Sharp, Tomas Ulrich and Ken Filiano. He is specially interested in the string group format and in collectives with a solid string presence. In the 2007 Vision Festival, in New York, he was one of the violinists, along with Billy Bang, Mark Feldman, and Dave Soldier, paying a tribute to Leroy Jenkins. In the Spectrum String Trio, we find him in the company of the French hurdy-gurdy player Domique Regeff and the Dutch contrabassist Wilbert DeJoode. This music is somewhere between the worlds of avant-jazz and contemporary classical music, with reminiscences of folk troubadour songs; after all, the hurdy-gurdy has medieval origins. Zíngaro’s sound world is an original one, coming from on one side, Paganini, Shostakovich, and Bartok, and on the other, Stuff Smith, Leroy Jenkins and, Ornette Coleman, whose “bad” violin playing constitutes for Zíngaro an example of how to fight academic virtuosic perfectionism. |