| Considering the work done by each one of the musicians forming the band Afterfall, this is the most improbable of all projects. The fact is that it works, and we must say it works beautifully. It could have been an ad-hoc group, reunited at the end of the summer of 2008 for a couple of gigs in Portugal. But things went so well on stage that they decided to go to studio and this is the astonishing result: when you gather some improvisers coming from different parts of the world – in this case, two Portuguese, two Americans and one French – marvelous things can happen. Luís Lopes was the Master of Ceremonies, more than the leader or the mentor: it was him who invited the rest of the participants, and knowing his past life playing rock and blues, his love for the "new thing" and his passion for noise music (he's the most brutal feedback guitarrist in Portugal – our own Caspar Brotzmann!), the choices he made were surprising. First Sei Miguel, a very idiosincratic trumpeter with a cubist cool style positioned somewhere between Chet Baker and John Cage. Than, Joe Giardullo, a saxophonist specialized on the soprano who applies the George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Theory of Tonal Organization in an experimental jazz format more inspired in Jelly Roll Morton than in Anthony Braxton, and who played with such distinct personalities as the new music composer Pauline Oliveros and the free jazz legend Joe McPhee. After, came Benjamin Duboc, a contrabassist crossing the boundaries of jazz, total improvisation and electro-acoustic music, going from the "conventional" (with Oliver Lake, Henry Grimes, Sunny Murray) to the extreme (with Jean-Luc Guionnet, Bertrand Denzler, Stéphane Rives). Finally, drummer Harvey Sorgen joined in, with his experience in opposite fields, with the likes of Ahmad Jamal and Carlos Santana, Dewey Redman and Paul Simon, Wadada Leo Smith and Michelle Shocked. This is the proof that the most crazy idea can be the best one. |