snobb
Astral Spirits label started in 2014 as extravaganza of sort offering obscure left-field avant-garde/free improve artists music in a form of old-fashioned audio cassettes. It looked more like a hipster dream than real world idea to listen music which usually requires especially high quality sound from something what never was a synonym of "quality sound" or quality in general.
Still,five years after, they are alive and kicking with wide catalogue and more renown names in there. Becoming more earthy they started offering vinyl and CDs besides of cassettes as well.
On one of their newest releases one can find quite a regular free jazz recorded by duo of Rodrigo Amado and Chris Corsano. Reeds player Rodrigo Amado (using exclusively tenor sax on this record)is one of the main faces of very active Portuguese avant-garde jazz of last two decades. American drummer Chris Corsano played with Bjork on her "Volta" and collaborated with Evan Parker, Thurston Moore and Nels Cline among many others.
Reedist-drummer free form music, recorded in Lisbon studio five years ago is groovy, soulful and even bluesy in moments. As many other better Amado works, there are lot of tunes and emotions besides of big doze of energy. Rodrigo never loses his way of controlled improvisation and as a result songs sound quite accessible, almost memorable.
There are lot of straight-in-your-face flowing pieces, and some slower ones, but altogether the album (of cassette size, not too long - and I really like it more and more)works pretty well. The energy is more positive and optimistic then destroying, and some songs are almost free jazz ballads. Changing each other, the collection of musical pieces sound surprisingly orthodox, almost traditional in good sense(within such a nontraditional music as free jazz is)
Another strong work of one of better European jazz sax player. Portuguese jazz from "hot" switches to "mature" and stays one among most interesting scenes in Europe.