Oba Loba by Norberto Lobo & João Lobo

Mogul de Jade”, the CD which joined the two Lobos for the first time –Lobo Norberto and Lobo João –, with a music that puzzled the label maniacs, couldn’t be an isolated act. The guitarist and the drummer are back with an album promising to be even more problematic,for store owners and record collectors, in what concerns the task to put it on the shelves. There’s more than one way to listen to “Oba Loba”: as a folk work going beyond the codes of this music idiom, “weird folk” included, or as a jazz opus contaminated by other expressions, more than what usually happens in the “creative jazz” segment.
The music here is hybrid, ambiguous, ambivalent, interstitial and a big surprise for all those who could think that the presences, as sidemen, of Giovanni DiDomenico, Jordi Grognard, Lynn Cassiers, Ananta Roosens, are evidences that there ́s some jazz, or some free improvised music, going on.
Well, it’s not true. Jazz is there, all right, as are multiple folk elements, but there’s much more to ear. It’s impossible to identify every factor, every influence, every reference we can find minute by minute, and that’s good. In this fantastic edition, everything is in a process of osmosis, with
the cells uniting instead of dividing themselves.
Each music piece functions as a cell, indeed. All of them are of short duration.Not little enough to become miniatures,
but acting as if they were: they synthesize what’s there to say and finish
immediately, sometimes abrupt and unexpectedly. Each track is like a scratch,a sketch, but with the supreme irony of being composed, orchestrated, interpreted and produced in a meticulous
way.
What the Lobos searched was the essential, the essence of forms and
sounds, and this record show us the discoveries they made. Ten of them, and magnificent

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