RED Trio: one year later
Last 30th January 2009 RED trio played once more time at Fabrica Braço de Prata. This was a special concert because it represented the trio’s first anniversary of the first concert that we have, exactly at the same place.
At Barcelos
I met Hernâni Faustino at an ad-hoc gig at Hot-Club in Lisboa where we played together on a septet directed by Ernesto Rodrigues. At the dinner I remember that we talked about the difficult it is to create a durable and strong musical project and the “porn star” syndrome all Portuguese musicians seam to have (I played with A, I played with B, I played with …). Well, at December 2007, I got an email from Hernâni inviting me to form a piano trio with Gabriel Ferrandini. I had played on lots of music project but I always desired to play with bass and drums. For me this formation represent the perfect balance between sound, timbre, melody, harmony and rhythm. So, It took me exactly 2 seconds to think about it and to reply yes to Hernâni.
We started working on creating the trios sound, avoiding to make it another piano trio, where the piano is the leading voice and the double bass and drums have a minor role. At the time we were all listening to other great piano trios like Sten Sandell’s trio with Paall Nilsen Love and Johan Berthling, a total free improvisation group; and the Necks, an australian piano trio more focused on creating drones and minimal atmosferic structures. That was the direction we were headed.
We played a lot 2008 in Portugal and we had a great time. We had great concerts at Barcelos (many thanks to the great Zoom guys), at Porto, Coimbra (we made the first part of Sonny Simmons trio TAGV at theatre and I got the chance to met the great Bobby Few! Btw you can download the concert we gave), Jazz.pt Festival at Hot-Club, two concerts at the unavoidable ZDB and two (or three…) at Fábrica Braço de Prata.
At July we had a three day residence at Moagem at Fundão a neighbour town form where I was born. We had three days to work fully on the trio sound and to record hours of music. I think these three days were fundamental because it allowed us to finally create OUR sound and we got enough recording material for our first recording that hopefully will be released this year.
Anyway, the concert at Fabrica unfortunately wasn’t that good because it started very late and we were a little tired. To start playing at 1:00 am (almost 2 hours late on schedule) on crowded place like Fábrica makes it difficult to get the necessary concentration levels improvised music requires. unfortunately, It seams that Fabrica Braço de Prata is shifting focus from more creative art forms to more conventional yet safe ones: a very usual fate here in Portugal.
Last year was hard for me with many changes on my life and lots of work. One of the most rewarding points I got was being able to play with the great guys Hernâni and Gabriel are and to see our music getting better every time we played together.