Hindrances by Pedro Neves Trio

Hindrances

Pedro Neves Trio

From Mature Jazz to the Melancholy of Current Days

We need no more than five seconds to grasp the aesthetic richness that this latest work by the Pedro Neves Trio stirs within us. Even knowing that all albums are a kind of recollection—in musical jargon, we could even speak of a da capo—about the power we have to reinvent music, I believe we are facing a singular, yet not unprecedented, case.

Singular, insofar as it is protected by an atmosphere laden with cosmopolitan jazz postmodernism, where the unity of interwoven sounds suggests that we access a significant form that stems from the study, refinement, and sensitivity of its performers, and not from some vain, self-congratulatory experiment.

And it is not unprecedented because the chamber music option, via the jazz trio, has been successfully tested many times—i.e.: Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau, ...just to name a few of the most fertile examples—assuring us of the rigour and authenticity of its members, combining knowledge and intimacy with the clarity of the sonic manifestations.

In this case, it is truly a matured exercise in stylistic purification where information overload is avoided—less is more—and where the currently fashionable, circus-like manoeuvres of contemporary spectacle and vertigo are rejected.

Imbued with a cool spirit, this work does not present us with an exclusively postbop program, but rather, with a statement where the musical material is autoethnographically excavated, track by track across eight delightful escapades, leaving us gathered between the power of its singular saying and the melancholic appearance of the exposed sounds.

At the same time, we are sent sonic messages that escape the stylistic domain of jazz—there are many European popular and erudite sonic evidences flanking this record—which allow us to affirm that jazz, itself, remains firm in the idea of what has always been dearest to it: the inevitability of mankind's confrontation with the limits of its own freedom and autonomy.

An album is a place of speech. This one does not escape that, placing upon us, its recipients, the burden of responsibility to consider it an element for collecting and sharing our own sayings, doings, and tastes.

Mário Azevedo

Youtube links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2LqX67s06A&list=RD-2LqX67s06A&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqiUDgqO8hc&list=RDGqiUDgqO8hc&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTrZ-Umq-R4&list=RDnTrZ-Umq-R4&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY4WiXJm0Lc&list=RDMY4WiXJm0Lc&start_radio=1

Jazz pianist and composer from Oporto, Portugal. Recorded Ausente, 05:21, Murmuration and Hindrances as a leader of his trio under the label Porta Jazz. Also plays and records with Lucia Martinez, Bruno Macedo, Mariana Vergueiro, Puzzle3, Sónia Pinto, among others.

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