Chão Maior - Drawing Circles (2021)

On the 29th of January, the first album by Chão Maior by Yaw Tembe will be released by Revolve, the result of a work that began in 2018 and already had some opportunities to perform live. The two trumpets (Tembe and João Almeida himself), the trombone (Yuri Antunes), the voice (Leonor Arnaut), the guitar (Norberto Lobo) and the drums (Ricardo Martins) deliver us a «drift-shaped» jazz which incorporates aspects of other songs (or there would not be Lobo, the Portuguese John Fahey, and Martins, the same as Pop Dell'Arte and Jibóia) and accepts the specific influences of Sun Ra's worldview, Ornette's tactical harmonics Coleman and Eddie Gale's soul sensitivity in “Ghetto Music”, along the way weaving parallels and intersections with Richard Long's “land art”.

As in Gume, another of his several projects, Yaw Tembe appears here first of all as a composer and band leader (although "according to the breathing cycles of each musician", as he himself stated in an Ellingtonian perspective), establishing a musical concept that is already being distinctive on the national scene. In the present case with formats such as the curious and repeated combination between the acidity of metals and the sweetness of the voice or as the association of the lines (typical of jazz discourse) with trumpet strings that are historically and aesthetically distant from this language. Or even how the melodic unison derived from the bigbandistic model is transformed into a textural abstractionism that is more specific to freely improvised music, and vice versa, with an astonishing immediacy and logic. We are already conquered when, arriving at “Circle 3”, the “drones” in a wave of blows - vaguely reminding us of La Monte Young's “The Melodic Version of the Second Dream of the High Tension Stepdown Line Transformer”, written for an ensemble of eight trumpets - they are interrupted by the Africanist and repetitive rhythms of the drums. The enthusiasm follows, until the last seconds of the disc.