The Healing is the first in a series of archival releases by Rodrigo Amado, restoring the European Echoes label on which some of his earliest works appeared between 2006 and 2009. It’s a duet with drummer Chris Corsano, recorded at ZBD in Lisbon in 2016, It documents an essential partnership in the quartet that first appeared on This Is Our Language (recorded 2012, released 2015), and which in turn became the quartet named This Is Our Language, with tenor saxophonist and trumpeter Joe McPhee and bassist Kent Kessler. The group has marked the strongest ties to the free jazz continuum of any of Amado’s ensembles, both homage to Ornette Coleman’s assertive “This Is Our Music” and a further declaration of that music’s status as language, a primary unit of communication and community identity alike. That quartet’s debut (as well as subsequent recordings) is likely familiar to long-term readers of this site: it was named its Record of the Year for 2015; eventually it placed third on the site’s “Free Jazz Collective Top 101 Recordings of the 2010s”, a poll in which Chris Corsano was the most frequently named individual musician.
If that first quartet recording stands as ideal reduction of free jazz to its essence: musical, communicative and emotive, this duo is, remarkably, a further refinement to essence – the voice here transmuted through a single tenor saxophone, the drum kit at once environment, time and assertion. This concert recording feels like healing, and a radical healing at that. On the opening track, “The Healing Day”, stretching to 24 minutes, the character shifts constantly, from mood to mood, voice to voice, tempo to tempo. The music might literally drive toward a healing that is at once intense, shared, dangerous, transcendent, the saxophone voice covering myriad approaches -- lyrical, reflective, explosive. The dialogue will suggest similar historic achievements in the work of John Coltrane with Elvin Jones or Rasheid Ali, or Sonny Rollins and Max Roach. The final sustained saxophone calls, each in a different voice and set against a continuum of drum rolls, may be as brilliant a conclusion to such a performance as is possible.
“The Cry” begins as literal stress test, a series of harsh, high-pitched, near squeals, isolated and unaccompanied, a kind of wake-up call that leads to a remarkably interactive performance in which Amado models interlocking phrases in a kind of highly-evolved hard bop that eventually leads to rapid passages that accelerate the tension while maintaining the same kinds of interlocking phrases and brief repeated assertions, ultimately shifting from a free explosion to ballad tempo and voice.
Chris Corsano’s individual gift for rhythmic creation shines from the outset of “The Griot”, his movement amongst different drums and cymbals recalling the rare gifts of Milford Graves for polyrhythm and sonic variety. Corsano here implies multiple rhythmic patterns, tempos and sounds interacting with the compound precision of planets in a solar system. It will emphasize the essential camaraderie of Corsano and Amado when the tenor saxophonist eventually enters, passing through distinct zones – melodic, dense intense, lyrical – all with shifting rhythmic values built on an overarching kinship of compound form, maintained and expanded together by the duo.
“Release is in the Mind”, a 5-minute envoi , is boppish and liberating. It begins with a pattern of rhythmic honks from Amado in Rollins mode which Corsano will soon join, the two extending the piece into a vibrant explosion of time and melody, eventually with Amado reaching some joyously sustained trills culminating in a lower register groan, communicating those special R&B underpinnings that are the tenor saxophone’s special legacy – instrument and synthesis of sacred bar walking.
This is, in a sense, the continuation of jazz as polyrhythmic community of musicians and sounds alike, simultaneously invoking multiple and interactive times and pulses -- historical, immediate and futurist.
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