Arrival at ZDB of this still young Catalan pianist whose work has been gaining, in time, deserved space in the tracks of European jazz and improvisation. Composer and improviser with a background in contemporary composition repertoire and jazz studies, Lai dwells in that same volatile intersection between composition and improvisation, with views as exploratory as they are conscious of the traditions and schools that interest her. An open field that leads her to various ventures in projects ranging from the greater experimentalism of Slight Deform alongside the guitarist Ferran Fages, of crossings between jazz and electronics in RIU, of her duo with Joan Moll to her solo career or in the Common Ground of the saxophonist José Lencastre, alongside luminaries of the Portuguese scene. From this connection to our movements, Lai arrives at Aquário accompanied by Àlex Riviriego on bass and Oriol Roca on drums, musicians who make up her trio and whose album ‘Corpos’ was released this year on the active Phonogram Unit. On this night, and in an unprecedented quartet, she invokes for her music the blow of João Almeida’s trumpet, a musician who has asserted himself decisively in the heart of the borough’s jazz scene and whose work has expanded to vast fields, from electronics in his project HOCUS, to the fusionism of Peachfuzz, participation in Yaw Tembe’s Chão Maior, the duo LUMP with Mariana Dionísio and various collaborations with artists such as Rodrigo Amado or Fred Lonberg-Holm. BS

Musical affinities reveal themselves countless times through a convergent taste in the same styles, eras, geographies or repertoires. More rarely it happens that there exists a shared enchantment around the creative moment, by the perspective of a pleasurable restlessness that is proper of the unpredictability that music exposes us to, if we allow ourselves the necessary surrender to the moment: It doesn’t matter so much then the repertoires, the idioms that characterize one or other known styles, or the heritages of a determined musical culture. In this artistic framework where Tomás Marques and Afonso Pais get together, the musical starting point is a consequence of this spontaneous and reciprocal way of being in the creative moment.

Afonso Pais – guitar
Tomás Marques – alto saxophone