Gapplegate Music Review | Humanization 4tet, Believe, Believe

By Grego Applegate Edwards Portuguese electric guitarist Luis Lopes joins together once again with fellow Portuguese tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado and the Texas brother rhythm team of Aaron Gonzalez on double bass and Stefan Gonzalez on drums in the group they call the Humanization 4tet. Their new album has recently come out. Believe, Believe (Clean Feed CF549CD) is the title and it continues the fine series of recordings they have put out in the last decade (some I have reviewed here, type their name in the search box above for those.) The new one bubbles over with the sort of high spirited, energetic state-of-the-art free-wheeling contemporary Jazz that the 4tet has become known for. There are song structures or melodic kernels and a rhythmic looseness that still tends to pulsate forward, often free but directional, swinging indirectly or directly as..

By Grego Applegate Edwards

Portuguese electric guitarist Luis Lopes joins together once again with fellow Portuguese tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado and the Texas brother rhythm team of Aaron Gonzalez on double bass and Stefan Gonzalez on drums in the group they call the Humanization 4tet. Their new album has recently come out. Believe, Believe (Clean Feed CF549CD) is the title and it continues the fine series of recordings they have put out in the last decade (some I have reviewed here, type their name in the search box above for those.)

The new one bubbles over with the sort of high spirited, energetic state-of-the-art free-wheeling contemporary Jazz that the 4tet has become known for. There are song structures or melodic kernels and a rhythmic looseness that still tends to pulsate forward, often free but directional, swinging indirectly or directly as fits the mood, ever freely loose in the best ways. Six compositional-improvisational segments (one in two versions) make up the whole.

When such a talented and sensitively attuned group plays together intensively and extensively for a good while as the Humanization 4tet has, there is one hopes a continual growth and a resiliency to the sureness of the free expressions as they project into aural space. Believe, Believe happily shows the fruits of that sort of hands-on, mutual improvisational opening out.

Aaron and Stefan have played music together for as long as two brothers who grew up together might and with their father Dennis Gonzalez on trumpet have long been playing as the excellent and acclaimed Yells at Eels group. When you listen to the prodigious rhythm team work on this album you hear the results of talent and experience, for they are strong and sure, and form a crucial bedrock for how this band moves strikingly forward.

It is true also that the double-front line of Luis Lopes on guitar and Rodrigo Amado on tenor sax show the natural aging of togetherness, like a fine wine. So Luis springs forth with very energized abstractions on guitar that fit in well with Rodrigo’s tenor effusions and the rhythm team’s assertions. He does some of his best playing on disk here. And it serves notice to all who hear that Luis is happening. He is a guitarist of the highest caliber, always ready-to-hand with creative fire and poetic tone.

Rodrigo continues to shine forth as one of the very best and original avant tenors playing today. He is of course an indispensable component of the 4tet and sounds fabulous throughout.

So we have a band with all the talent and seasoning one could ask for, creating some of their most compelling and ravishing best on this CD album. Believe, Believe has all you could ask for, all you might hope for to make you a believer in this 4tet and all they do. One of their very best. Get this one and believe!

gapplegatemusicreview.blogspot.com

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The Free Jazz Collective | Luís Lopes Humanization 4tet – Believe, Believe ****

By Nick Ostrum Now a unit for 12 years, this is the fourth release of the Lisbon-Dallas quartet of Luís Lopes (electric guitar), Rodrigo Amado (tenor saxophone), Aaron González (bass), and Stefan González (drums). Two years ago for their tenth anniversary, they embarked on a tour of the United States, during which they found their way to the Marigny Studios in New Orleans. OK. So, I am not sure that the location itself had any unique effect on these recordings, but the liner notes make a big deal out of it and this session took place just one month before I moved down here. To my chagrin. The Humanization 4tet is known for its singular blending of free bop, funeral cool jazz, heavy funk, punk and postpunk, metal and, I imagine, pretty much any other musical influence you could associate..

By Nick Ostrum

Now a unit for 12 years, this is the fourth release of the Lisbon-Dallas quartet of Luís Lopes (electric guitar), Rodrigo Amado (tenor saxophone), Aaron González (bass), and Stefan González (drums). Two years ago for their tenth anniversary, they embarked on a tour of the United States, during which they found their way to the Marigny Studios in New Orleans. OK. So, I am not sure that the location itself had any unique effect on these recordings, but the liner notes make a big deal out of it and this session took place just one month before I moved down here. To my chagrin.

The Humanization 4tet is known for its singular blending of free bop, funeral cool jazz, heavy funk, punk and postpunk, metal and, I imagine, pretty much any other musical influence you could associate with the fringes of early 2000s youth culture in the US and, apparently, in Portugal as well. In a way, they are the Iberian/American counterpart to projects like Fire!, The Thing, and even Angles, who have one foot firmly planted in a Holy Ghost fire-breathing folkish melodicism and the other in rock’s fringes. Indeed, these musicians experiment with boundaries, odd juxtapositions and juncture. Apart from Humanization, Lopes and Amado have appeared on countless releases often with the deeply variegated Lisbon scene. Lopes in particular has released some absolutely wild noise balladeering most recently through his Love Songs project and his duo with Julien Desprez. Aaron and Stefan have meanwhile been plumbing the pipelines linking grind, heavy angular fusion, and even stranger experimental music separately (especially Stefan in his percussion/vocals project Orgulla Primitivo, the experimental hip-hop group The Young Mothers, and the more classically crust Imperial Slaughter) and together (the blackened free-psychedelia combo Unconscious Collective and the S.O.D./Naked City love-child Akkolyte). That is, while still maintaining their two-decades-and-running free jazz trio Yells at Eels with their father Dennis González.

Surprise, surprise, Believe, Believe is a wonderous melting pot. It leans towards free jazz but has unmistakably contemporary shadings. Lopes plays his now characteristic jagged and deconstructed guitar lines, but he converges them with jazzier runs and rhythms. Synchronic themes piece together out of rough fragments of hard-bop melodies, which are then shredded into scraps that the band slowly pieces back together. Amado can play sultry. Just listen to the first minute of Ed Harris/Tranquilidad Alborotadora, the first section a Bill-Lee-penned tribute to the great eponymous saxophonist, the second a take on an Unconscious Collective composition. But, as anyone who has heard This is Our Language or A History of Nothing already knows, he can really open up and spiral into some mesmerizingly outre territory. The González brothers meanwhile hold clattery and off-time but steady rhythms, like Haden and Blackwell but even less predisposed to tradition and more interested in the heavy vamping and flailing percussion that have found an equally fitting home in their spazzier and more metallic undertakings.

Themes are catchy and may be ultimately rooted in bop, but the most noteworthy elements come when the musicians avail themselves of the melodic constraints and play on a feeling or simply on stored energy. These are the places where the punk-rock inspiration, the just-short-of-reckless abandon take over. And when they do, it is something to behold, even if it only lasts for a quick half hour.

freejazzblog.org

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