Pedro Melo Alves - In Igma (2020)

Commissioned by the Portuguese Jazz no Parque series (Serralves Foundation, with Rui Eduardo Paes as the curator) in 2019, In Igma, the ensemble, and the opus now released, is a particularly accomplished example of the equating mind of drummer/percussionist and composer Pedro Melo Alves, who is more and more known for assembling musicians you don’t expect to see together and with them to conceive something that comes from very different musical sources. Besides Melo Alves himself, the instrumentalists are Mark Dresser, Eve Risser and Abdul Moimême and there’s three singers in (inter)action,Aubrey Johnson, Beatriz Nunes and Mariana Dionísio. The resulting music emanates from the interstices between jazz, contemporary music and experimentalism, in the process becoming this beautiful and quite intriguing object, described as a «quest for what is most primary and prior” and an «exploration of fresh influences, coming naturally from a broad aesthetic horizon».