This year Clean Feed was invited by Utrecht Jazz Fest to program a complete day and we were invited to play there. The concert also served as the formal presentation of our debut cd.

The concert took place at Rasa a venue with beautifull acoustics right at center of Utrecht. The first part of the concert was with the fantastic Who Trio, featuring Michel Wintsch on the piano, Gerry Hemingway on drums and Bänz Oester on bass. Their music is very quiet and calm so to have some contrast we decided to play a little louder and faster. Jason Stein also played solo at the festival at the same day, so we decided to invite him to play the last music with us. By the way, Jason’s concert solo was really impressive!

It was a very good concert and experience for all of us. If you understand dutch here is a review from the concert.

At July 2008 we where lucky to be able to do a three day residency at Moagem, Fundão. We played and recorded for hours and hours and the result was impressive: the trio got a new sound and we lots of recording sessions with extremely interesting material. At the end of the residency we had a concert.

Choosing the final tracks was a difficult task due to long hours of recordings we had. To fit all the music we enjoyed on 50 to 55 minutes was another difficult task because we had to eliminate several pieces we all enjoyed. After a long and democratic process we choose the following line up:

1. “Core”. Personally I think this is the best track. We were extremely concentrated and focused on a small set of ideas that we used and explored till the end. Lots of tension, dynamics and nervous music.
2. “Flat”: This one starts with a beautiful doublebass solo from Hernâni.
3. “Core, Flat”. The idea was to play something quiet with a ballad mood.
4. “Quick Sand”. All of us are trying to blend every instrument timbre with each other using lots of extended techniques. The dynamics during this track are extreme: from almost silence to pure noise.
5. “Time Wise”. On this one I decided to prepare the piano on a “John Cage” fashion using bolts, rubber, paper, etc. It is something I usually don’t do because once you have your piano prepared it’s very difficult to quickly return to a plain piano sound, especially on a concert. So normally I do prefer to modify the piano sound by placing stuff on the piano strings (instead of between the string) that I can easily place and remove while playing. But as we were recording and we had time we decided to try it. At the end Gabriel has a great solo.
6. “Burning Light”. A noise and short piece.

We mixed and mastered the album with Carlos Santos. It was a very complex and painstaking process because of several problems that happened during the recording: the piano microphones were placed to near from the piano sound board, so whenever I played louder there some minor but very annoying high pitch distortion problems with the mix. The sound captured by the doublebass microphone also was problematic. Anyway, only someone so patient as Carlos would be able to solve all of those problems.

The CD design is from Travassos. The CD features linear notes from Pandelis Karayorgis.

2009 was not a very good year for RED trio because we had very few concerts although all of us had lots project we were working on. So we decided to postpone the CD release to 2010.

Now that the CD is out we are all very proud and happy with the result. The first reactions and critics are very positive and we hope this is a starting point for something bigger for the trio.

You can buy the CD from Clean Feed, iTunes Store, Amazon or from me.

Next Saturday I’ll play at 22:300 with RED Trio again at Fabrica Braço de Prata.

At the present moment I don’t have more free time (actually I have less time), but I realized that I was creating everywhere lots of information I could aggregate here. I’m posting daily lots of links do delicious.com, concert information at Last.fm, videos at Vimeo and Youtube and photos at Flickr. So this blog will serve as a hub to all this information I’m spreading on the internet.

I’ll use this blog to talk about my activities as a musician. I play the piano at several free improvised and Jazz groups at Lisboa. So I will use this blog to post news, information, photos and recordings.

I’m also a web developer and I’m passionate about technology. So I’ll use this blog to talk about the technologies I’m thrilled about and some of the projects I’m involved in.

I’m starting this blog in english even knowing that english is not my primary language (I’m from Portugal). So, it will be a way to practice my english writting. There will be for sure post in Portuguese, though.