Carlos Bica & Azul - Azul In Ljubljana (2018)

If you say Azul, you have to say Carlos Bica as well, hardly anyone in jazz is connected to a single band like the Portuguese with this unique trio featuring Frank Möbus on guitar and Jim Black on drums. Azul has been working together for more than 20 years and is considered one of the most significant and fertile trios of this moment. “Azul in Ljubljana“, is their 7th album and the very first one ever live recorded.

As a composer, double bassist Carlos Bica is a cultivator of the song format, but if as such he knows the virtues of studio production and engineering, in order to perfect a composition at a detail level, he’s also very much conscious that, in jazz, the best for a song is to be played live and to grow from the confines of what is written through improvisation. Hence the importance of this new album of his band Azul, with Frank Möbus and Jim Black, recorded in the magnificent 2015 concert they gave at the Ljubljana Jazz Festival. All the studio recordings by this trio are great, but here the music breathes more widely, go more deep and have more expressive effect, because a jazz song depends more from the “here and now” of a performance than a pop or a folk song, even when there’s aspects of both in the music. They’re self evident, as it is the rock factor in some of the tracks, and also the lyrical quality coming directly from the classical tradition: Azul is the sum of all this in a beautiful, mysterious, dramatic and sometimes intense way, giving a human, fragile, contradictory soul to the electric jazz of the 21st century.