A duo with an accumulated skill and vision that is almost unheard of in the wider music scene, this meeting is not so strange in its essence as it is strange to have happened so recently. Despite their different trajectories. If we want to categorise them dryly to arrive at a common ground, we can think of Amado with all his history already fully revered in jazz and Maranha with an imposing mark in the fields of minimalism and drone. But neither of these fields are opposed, nor do the two musicians close themselves off from these taxonomies, opening up spaces for crossings, turns, and innovations in and between languages that start from these premises to approach more abstract rock, free improvisation, or electronic collusion. Parallel stories that crossed paths through musicians such as Manuel Mota or Gabriel Ferrandini, adding to the musical mosaic of this scene, with a fair reception outside this small border.
‘Wrecks’, released at the end of last year by Nariz Entupido, captures the first meeting of this pair at a concert at Escola do Largo in Lisbon. Remarkable in its symbiosis, it finds the two musicians aligned toward the same horizon from their own very personal visions. From afar, we might think of Terry Riley’s duo with Don Cherry in Cologne as the spiritual antecedent of the blessed clash between jazz and minimalism, but this is a whole other music, well emphasised by Maranha’s very own organ and Amado’s full saxophone, in a long 44-minute digression that goes from telluric ruminations to cosmic ascensions with a clear, breathy notion of dynamics, tensions, and release. The flow of Maranha’s hypnotic sound is reformulated in new passages, from dense landscapes to flirtations with noise, vital sustenance for a whole wealth of Amado’s phrasing, which ranges from lyrical moments to intemperate screams, from contemplation to suffering clamor, in a dark torrent that draws lines of light, at a time of its own. BS
