JOÃO LENCASTRE — Free Celebration (review)

JOÃO LENCASTRE — Free Celebration album cover Album · 2024 · 21st Century Modern Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
js
Is there any jazz subgenre that is more uniquely and purely jazz than bebop, the answer is no. Any other jazz subgenre seems to have an outside comparative, (free jazz - avant-garde composers), (post bop - French composers), (hard bop - blues and RnB), (fusion - rock and funk) etc. When played correctly, bebop stands alone as one of the most singular contributions to the musical world, but very few really play it right anymore. Since bebop got reduced to college classes taught to budding young musicians, there has been a lot of mediocre bop out there, both at the universities and at the clubs. But there are still those that can play bop with the requisite crazy abandon and flippant attitude as created by Charlie Parker and then furthered by Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. This leads us to Portuguese drummer Joao Lencastre and his new album “Free Celebration”, one of the hottest avant-garde neo-bop albums to come out since the last outing by Walking Distance or Anthony Braxton’s superb Parker tribute.

Frantic and crazy bop in the style of Ornette and Dolphy are the backbone of this album, but not in a retro way at all. There are plenty of current modernisms in the mix too, such as jagged Mary Halvorson type guitar from Pedro Branco and plenty of noisy analog electronics from keyboardist Joao Bernardo. Through the course of the album the band veers off into many directions from free fusion to noisy chaos and then into something sentimental such as the track “Kathelyn Gray” or grooving hard bop on “The Third World”. For the correct bebop flavor you need a high flying alto sax player, and that comes from Ricardo Toscano, easily one of the best altoists happening today.

There is an eclectic mix of musical ingredients at work here, but this album never becomes one of those John Zorn style clumsy pastiche things in which incongruent elements are slammed together just for effect. Nope, all of this music grows and changes in very organic ways and with solid musical integrity. The track “Giggin” is a great representation for this band as it opens with blazing fast bop that grows more intense with shifting tempos pushing things towards chaos as a hornet’s nest of electronics enters and multiple soloists push things to the edge. “Free Celebration” is one of the best jazz records to come out this year.
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