PAURA The Construction of Fear - Alípio C Neto / Dennis Gonzalez / Ernesto Rodrigues / Guilherme Rodrigues / Mark Sanders Creative Sources CS 139 CD

PAURA – The Construction Of FearAn atypical combination of talents: Alípio C. Neto (saxes), Dennis González (trumpet, voice), Ernesto Rodrigues (viola), Guilherme Rodrigues (cello, radio) and Mark Sanders (drums). The only thing that puzzles me is the rather preposterous theory about surprise and fear in jazz expressed by a Davide Sparti in the inside leaflet and, for good measure, rendered incorrectly in English from the (already incomprehensible) original. But Italy is the country in which books and movies have a different meaning than in the rest of the world due to the hard-to-believe incompetence of translators, so no big news here. Instruments exists, thank god, to deliver us from words and this particular project sounds great: strong, determined, both muscularly affirmed and barely whispered, the improvisations suggesting indeed that kind of anxious feeling that what’s unknown and/or unexpected elicit in frail minds. The timbral melange is at times exceptional, the corpulence of Neto and González versus the fascinating meagreness of the Rodrigueses with Sanders acting as a gifted master of percussive ceremonies. There’s no trace of mellifluousness in this intriguing crossing of free jazz and EAI dipped in theatrical stir, and which defies the inevitable conventions of unrehearsed music for its large part.

Massimo Ricci