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Just like the tropicalistas of the Sixties, Amaro Freitas believes within the sophistication of conventional Brazilian music. Hailing from the northeastern metropolis of Recife—a regional neighbor of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso’s Salvador—he combines the agricultural sounds of his native area with the cosmopolitan flash of Río de Janeiro. Since making his debut in 2016 with Sangue Negro, Freitas has integrated the rhythms of rumba and baião with arduous bop angle and a sublime formalism nearer to Bach than Bahia. Y’Y, his newest, was impressed partly by a visit to Manaus, a metropolis of two million deep within the Amazon. The one actual musical connection the album has to Freitas’ earlier work is his presence on the keys. Gone is the urbane small-ensemble jazz of 2018’s Rasif and 2021’s extra adventurous Sankofa, changed with humid, spacious music that strikes from tranquility to cacophony with exceptional ease.
Freitas’ polyrhythmic enjoying—concurrently unpsooling totally different cadences in every hand—is without delay lacy and delicate, thumping and propulsive; “it’s as if my left hand is Africa and my proper hand is Europe,” he lately advised The New York Occasions. On Y’Y, he finds new methods to use that philosophy to his preparations. On “Uira (Encantada da Água) – Vida e cura,” he performs a ready piano whose muted strings remodel the notes into stipples of percussion, extra like a tabla than a standard keyboard instrument, whereas the feathery filigree of a second, untreated piano appears to drift throughout the highest. A bassline paying homage to Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz paces round an anxious plucked determine in “Dança dos Martelos,” and as Freitas begins to merge the 2 patterns, he bangs on the decrease octaves, which rattle with ready shells. All through, he applies little trills and performs riffs that really feel palindromic, phasing with the left hand whereas the best hand remains to be sprinkling pixie mud. Tidiness and precision have all the time been a few of his best strengths, and it’s thrilling to listen to him complicate his personal tendency towards order.
Whereas these experiments transfer Y’Y farther from jazz and nearer to the spirit of each indigenous Amazonian music and the avant-garde classical realm, Freitas engages in vigorous conversations with a collection of visitors within the album’s second half, bringing to thoughts the open world of McCoy Tyner’s Extensions. He simmers Jeff Parker’s stately guitar right into a red-eyed, late-night groove in “Mar de Cirandeiras,” whereas in “Gloriosa,” he brings Brandee Youthful’s harp glissandos right down to earth with a single observe that pings again and again.
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