Victor

A wonderful early album from Victor Assis Brasil - one of Brazil's greatest saxophone players of the 60s and 70s, and an artist with a keen post-Coltrane approach to his work! The album's awash in modally grooving numbers that would have made Coltrane proud - soulfully swinging tunes that bounce along on tight piano, bass, and percussion - as Victor spins out some lean and exploratory lines on alto sax. The album features some nice work by a young Claudio Roditi, and the lineup shifts a bit from track to track - but Brasil's incredible tone and solo work on the alto sax really holds the whole set together, and offers up a new surprise at each track!

This is Victor Villadangos’s first recording for Naxos and I hope it is not the last as we are treated to some beautifully clear articulated playing that extracts just the right nuances from this music of the Argentine. Most of the pieces are new to me, although I am familiar with the "Serie Americana" of Hector Ayala, firstly through an early vinyl recording by Narciso Yepes and recently on CD by Eleftheria Kotzia. This rendition by Victor Villadangos, with its firm rhythms and fine clarity, is, I feel, the superior version.

Piazzolla, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Bettinelli: the fil rouge that unites this apparently anomalous choice is to be sought, first and foremost, in the original character of the repertoire, composed purposely for two guitars, in other words conceived especially for this combination and for its ‘double’ and ‘specular’ sonic possibilities. This exploration of the sonic universe allows us to rediscover a repertoire whose leitmotiv can be found in the element of dialogue, in the capacity of the guitar to become ‘other’ than itself by reverberating in its own identity: the mirror image that reflects a vision that is identical and yet filtered by a reality, that captures the essence of the guitar duo as an extended form of the solo guitar, a vehicle of complementarity and of expression amplified in its sonic potential. But that is not all: the choice of three composers whose expressive forms differ widely from each other, in their genesis, in their syntax and realization, can nonetheless find coherence in their common search for a balance between the voices, in the crystalline clarity of the conduct of the parts and in the sonic representation of a singular unitarity, in an accomplished identity of intent.

Victor Assis Brasil was the best Brazilian jazzman of his generation, having being praised by international critics. Brasil showed early evidence of talent for music, excelling at the harmonica and the drums. At age 12 he gave his first concert at the harmonica. In 1961, at age 16, he was presented with an alto saxophone. In 1965, while already a professional, Brasil recorded his first album, Desenhos, with highly favorable reviews, consolidating his pioneering role as a Brazilian jazz musician. His next conquests were the achievement of third place at the 1966 International Jazz Contest in Vienna, Austria, and of the Best Soloist award in the Berlin Jazz Festival, which granted him a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music (Boston, MA). During the following four years he spent in the U.S., Brasil wrote most of his 400 works…

This is a wonderful album of acoustic guitar music. I've always loved the Tango and the so-called "classical" guitar. This album brings them together delightfully. The album transports me to a smoke-filled Argentinean nightclub where the Tango is danced very passionately. If you are into the Tango or guitar music or just want to be transported, in your mind, to a different time and place, buy this disc.

Who is María? Horacio Ferrer,librettist of this unconventional operita , said that she was a representation of Buenos Aires, embodying the spirit of tango itself. María de Buenos Aires lies outside any known genre. According to Ferrer, its highly poetic libretto was written not to be understood, but to create emotion and atmosphere .Piazzolla's music, too, offers a charged mix of classical forms and Argentinian traditions milonga, tango and the sparring spoken word of the traditional payada. In this,the first major recording since the 1980s, Delphian stalwarts Mr McFall's Chamber are joined by their long-term collaborators Valentina Montoya Martínez and Nicholas Mulroy, narrator Juanjo Lopez Vidal, and internationally acclaimed tango musicians Victor Villena and Cyril Garac.

Victor Assis Brasil was the best Brazilian jazzman of his generation, having being praised by international critics. Brasil showed early evidence of talent for music, excelling at the harmonica and the drums. At age 12 he gave his first concert at the harmonica. In 1961, at age 16, he was presented with an alto saxophone. In 1965, while already a professional, Brasil recorded his first album, Desenhos, with highly favorable reviews, consolidating his pioneering role as a Brazilian jazz musician. His next conquests were the achievement of third place at the 1966 International Jazz Contest in Vienna, Austria, and of the Best Soloist award in the Berlin Jazz Festival, which granted him a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music (Boston, MA)…

'The dreamer! That double of our existence, that chiaroscuro of the thinking being', wrote Gaston Bachelard in 1961. 'The old is dying, the new cannot be born, and in that chiaroscuro, monsters appear', adds Antonio Gramsci. Sandrine Piau has chosen to use these two quotations as an epigraph to her new recording: 'My family and friends know about this obsession that never leaves me completely. The antagonism between light and darkness. The chiaroscuro, the space in between…'