Pedro Melo Alves' Omniae Large Ensemble - Lumina (2021)

“We sure are alive”, writes Pedro Melo Alves in the liner notes of “Lumina”. It’s true, the music inside is a survival chant: we made it, after two years of a science fiction-like nightmare. And suddenly, there’s some light. The Portuguese composer and drummer was the winner in 2016 of the Bernardo Sassetti Award with the first version of his Omniae Ensemble concept. At the invitation of the Guimarães Jazz Festival in 2020, during a brief interval between lockdowns, he transformed the original septet to a 23-elements large ensemble, adding electronics, tuba, clarinet, flutes, bassoon, cello, classical guitar, three singers and a maestro (Pedro Carneiro, also known as a percussionist in both the contemporary classical and improvised music fields) to the original mix and writing new, defying and more inclusive, in terms of vocabularies and grammars, scores for it. “How do we even start to look for all that ungraspable light?”, Melo Alves asks. Well, this is how.