Volúpias

The Portuguese (but born in California 1986, from a Mozambican natural and a Brazilian of Italian heritage) drummer Gabriel Ferrandini is usually found in freely improvised music contexts (those, for instance, of Red Trio and Rodrigo Amado Motion Trio in the celebrated Lisbon scene and with an impressive international collaboration history: Alexander Von Schlippenbach, Axel Dörner, Evan Parker, John Butcher, Nate Wooley, Peter Evans, Sten Sandell or Thurston Moore, among many others) but three years ago he decided to turn himself to composition and started the new approach with an artistic residency in one of the most prestigious Portuguese venues for music, ZDB. To turn ideas and notations to sound he invited two of his most near companions, tenor saxophonist Pedro Sousa (his partner in the PeterGabriel duo) and double bassist Hernâni Faustino for that task, the same playing in “Volúpias”. The record you have here is result of one year residency at ZDB. Maybe because of that, the titles of the pieces are the names of Lisbon streets, the ones that lead from Ferrandini’s house to his studio and then to ZDB. Curiously enough, if Ferrandini sounds here more jazz-oriented than ever (this process went through the creation of an extended version of “Love Song”, by Tony Williams), two of the tracks are arrangements of compositions by an electronic musician, also Portuguese (Ondness), who combines dance beats with exotic soundscapes, very far from what we call jazz. The message underneath is a delight, warning us that this commitment to the jazz format isn’t necessarily “conventional”. Nothing done by Gabriel Ferrandini is, thank the gods…