Alma Tree - Sonic Alchemy Suprema (2024)

“In 2020, alongside foundational references, the ever-unconventional Ra Kalam Bob Moses posted on a social network a list of some of his recent discoveries of drummers from around the world whom he considered creative and visionary. Among the mentioned names was Melo Alves, who quickly responded, indicating other drummers whose work he believed Ra Kalam could also appreciate. Among these was the Portuguese-Catalan Vasco Trilla. The links were established between three drummers who found in friendship and mutual respect the ideal vehicles to develop creative music through percussion. Thus, Alma Tree was born.

Belonging to different generations, the three musicians navigate through the most stimulating streams of jazz and improvisation. Melo Alves, Ra Kalam, and Trilla are highly skilled rhythm practitioners, idiosyncratic, with unique characteristics that do not dilute but synergistically enhance when engaging in cross-pollination games that are known to originate but never where they flourish.

Ra Kalam Bob Moses is a historic drummer who helped transform the sound of jazz from the late 1960s, playing in groups led by Roland Kirk, Paul Bley, Pat Metheny, Gary Burton, Steve Swallow, or Dave Liebman. Approaching 76 years old, he combines an impressive wealth of experience with an incessant curiosity for what is happening today and for new explorations and directions in music across various realms. Pedro Melo Alves, who engages in projects like The Rite of Trio and the superb Omniae Ensemble, among other encounters in multiple contexts, and Vasco Trilla, a musician with a strong connection to the Polish scene of adventurous jazz and improvised music, are two central figures in the new exploratory percussion, with significant visibility in European circuits.

The trio met in person for the first time at the end of May 2022, during a tour in Portugal. While occasionally playing compositions by Ra Kalam, the trio dedicates itself body and soul to entirely improvised music, exploring all the extended resources of each of their broad percussive universes. Alma Tree is, therefore, a trio with distinctive features, not in terms of instrumentation, but in what these three rhythm alchemists can do with it. A tree of souls whose branches intertwine to strengthen and grow together. (Echoes of Herberto Helder resonate: "We touch each other like the trees of a forest inside the earth.") "Sonic Alchemy Suprema" is the debut record of the trio, released by the Carimbo Porta-Jazz label.

Summoning sounds of unknown origin, the trio challenges space and time, mixing geographies and pointers. A kind of invocation of spirits, the auroral "Opening" serves as an antechamber for "One With Infinite Space", a composition by Ra Kalam with enchanting wind instruments, which we find again in "Prayer," featuring saxophones by Julius Gabriel and José Soares and João Pedro Brandão's flute. The first of three individual exercises is the ritualistic "Alma Ra Kalam"; "An Ominous Odyssey" is a journey to the limits of an imaginary ancestral tribe, "An Eerie Garden Sighting" brings a magical atmosphere, and "Cosmic Weaving Loom" refers to a long and fascinating interstellar journey (not coincidentally, the longest piece on the album). What we hear is often deeply imagistic, like the suggestion of fantastical creatures in "Dusk to Dawn Animalia." "High Spirits" once again summons supernatural beings, and "Plate Waltzing" astonishes with filigree work. "Alma Pedro" reveals an exquisitely rhythmic timepiece, giving way to the thrill that soon takes over in "Animal Instinct." "Dance of the Celestial Madman" transports us to a shamanic ritual, and "Alma Vasco" plunges the listener into a serenely disturbing cloud. "Soaring Leaf" closes the album with high energy levels, mercurial saxophones, and Brandão's pioneering flute. "Sonic Alchemy Suprema" is therefore an exercise in organizing uncertainty, an experience made up of miniatures, ephemeral constructions, small sound branches that intersect, collide, caress, in a kind of emotional knitting with a strong physical presence.