Portuguese tenor sax hero Rodrigo Amado quoted recently John Coltrane on his Facebook page: “I believe that we are here to grow ourselves to the best good that we can get to, to the best good that we can be. And as we’re becoming this, this will just come out of the horn. Whatever that’s gonna be that’s what it will be. Good can only bring good”. This quote can also frame the work of Amado’s international super-group, The Bridge, and its sophomore album, Further Beyond, recorded live at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam in April 2023.
Not that any of the great, highly experienced musicians of The Bridge - German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, Norwegian double bass player Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and American drummer (and vocalist) Gerry Hemingway, need to prove anything. Each one of the musicians has played in several legendary bands and contributed to the evolution of free music in the last decades. Von Schlippenbach with the Globe Unity Orchestra and his long-running trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens; Hemingway with the iconic Anthony Braxton Quartet, with Marilyn Crispell and Mark Dresser, and in his own groups; Håker Flaten with The Thing and his own new group, (Exit) Knarr; and Amado with his own quartet, This Is Our Language, with Joe McPhee, Kent Kessler, and Chris Corsano. Together, they bring to the stage nearly two hundred years of experience in creating and performing free music.
But the quartet itself is a collective platform for creating free music that has a rare, ever-expanding, and uplifting spiritual power, with a rich perspective of the past and the present, bound in tradition while breaking free of it. The debut album of The Bridge, Beyond The Margins (Trost, 2023), which was also recorded live in the quartet's debut performance at the Pardon To Tu club in Warsaw in October 2022, already established its profound, collective affinity, with its brilliant, commanding games of surprise and inevitability. The Bridge keeps expanding its free music universe. Free Jazz Collective comrade Stuart Broomer (in his Ezz-thetics column for Point of Departure), and Point of Departure editor Bill Shoemaker (in his liner notes) call this kind of free music a “spontaneous creation”, after Sam Rivers, and a refined sense of structural play. And just like Rivers, Amado, and The Bridge do not renounce melody and grooves.
Amado knows how to tie spontaneous, soulful melodies with an acute nut elegant sense of structure; He suggests open, four-way conversations that enjoy the free mastery of von Schlippenbach, including his wise references to Monk’s pieces, Hemingway’s rich, fast-shifting rhythmic patterns, and Håker Flaten’s Alyer-ian way of anchoring the free improvisations with soul songs motifs. Amado titled the pieces with names that flirt with iconic soul songs that anticipated seismic changes in politics in society, in the same manner that jazz is an insistently social art form. The opening, 17-minute “A Change Is Gonna Come” has nothing to do with the melody of the Sam Cooke song, but reminds us about the motivating, transformative power of music. The closing, short piece, “That’s How Strong My Love Is”, uses the title of a song associated with Otis Redding, and again, focuses on its deeply moving power and the quartet’s collective, playful imagination. These pieces, alongside the 27-minute title piece, reinforce the notion that free music, and especially great, inspired music like that of The Bridge, is first and foremost about empathy and compassion, on stage, with the audience, and further beyond.
The beautiful cover artwork is by Miguel Navas, who also did the cover artwork for Beyond The Margins, titled “#10”, from the series "Uncertain Smile - Paisagens de um tempo incerto" (Landscapes of an uncertain time).
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