Oranges

CD – Creative Sources Recordings - CS068, Lisbon 2006

Imagine we’re eating dinner at Miguel Martins’ house. Imagine the wine is extraordinary. Miguel has brought me to Portugal to play three concerts, and I end up playing four —a real treat. Béchir Saade, the woodwind improviser from Beirut is in town. We’ve just played with Ernesto and Guilherme Rodrigues and now we’re dining together. Imagine Guilherme comments on the curious relationship that color has always had with music. Miguel mentions synesthesia, the peculiar tendency to see specific colors in one’s mind’s eye when hearing music. Ernesto recalls Scriabin’s famous color organ, and Wade says that, personally, he prefers the parody that French author and trumpeter, Boris Vian, makes of it in L’automne à Pekin, where one of the characters invents a piano that prepares a different cocktail each time you play it. Somebody brings up the idea of color in musical groups: Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Yellowjackets, Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers… Miguel mentions the Blue Devils, with which jazz trumpet prodigy, Clifford Brown, made his first recording. And of course, there are the Blues, an entire genre of music named after a color. Then we get onto song titles: Blue Moon, Blue Velvet, The Blue Danube, White Christmas, Nights in White Satin, Yellow River, Yellow was the Color of my True Love’s Hair; Green Grow the Rushes –Oh; The Red, White and Blue Forever; Itsy-Bitsy, Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini; Black, Brown and Beige Suite; The Purple People Eater; There’s a Red House Over Yonder —there was even a hit in Spain in the nineteen sixties called Black is Black (I want my baby back…). That’s when we realize there’s something missing. Un hunh, that’s right. There’s no orange! Béchir says: “What about Orange was the Color of her Dress, then Blue?” — a fantastic Mingus composition. Everybody nods their head, but nobody can think of anything else, not one more song, not one more group, not one more album with the word “orange.” Wade points out its very special status in English: it’s the word nothing rhymes with! Songwriters avoid it like the plague because it just sits there, waiting. Even Plato couldn’t mate it with anything! He had to cut it in half and then posit it’s possible reunification in order to use it as a metaphor for any sort of linkage at all. Now imagine we’re having dinner at Ernesto’s house. His wife, Cristina, is always wonderfully generous with us, and she and Ernesto have put on a great spread. Imagine how good the wine is! Somebody asks Ernesto where the word “Portugal” comes from. He says most etymologist trace it to Portus Cale, a combination of the Latin word (“Portus”) for port and the Greek one (“Calle”) for beautiful. This links Portugal to the Greco-Roman tradition to which much of “cultured” Europe likes to trace its origin: Praxitiles, Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Pliny the Elder, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Virgil, Plutarch, Laertes; the list is seemingly endless. Of course, historically, the Iberian Peninsula was a part of the Roman Empire, as well as a home to the Carthaginians and the Phoenicians, not to mention a considerable cast of Goths, Vandals, Visigoths and other barbarians from the North. “What about the South?” asks Béchir. That’s right: Iberia underwent almost eight centuries of Arab occupation. Eight centuries; a very long occupation by one of the most culturally and scientifically advanced civilizations in the world at that time. By the year 940, the Arab-ruled city of Córdoba had a public library with over 440,000 books! And there were 69 other public libraries in the same city at that time, not to mention streetlights, 300 public baths and numerous other modern conveniences sadly lacking on the other side of the Pyrenees then, and even much later. As Dr. Abdullah Mohammad Sindi —with whom Béchir could have studied at the London School of Economics, but didn’t— points out, the first street light in London didn’t appear until seven hundred years later. Still, despite the fundamental importance of Arab inventions like algebra, trigonometry, the clock, the zero, the decimal system or algorithms, even today, many Iberian Europeans tend to look almost exclusively to Greco-Roman culture to explain their cultural origins. Imagine Wade points out that the star fruit of Iberia is, of course, the Orange —a visual metaphor for the Iberian sun that draws summer visitors from all over Northern Europe. Its name comes from the ancient Sanskrit narangah, traveling through Persian and Arabic to reach the Portuguese laranja —not so very far from the original Sanskrit. Then Béchir pulls it all together, telling us that one of the Arab words for sweet orange is: bourtoughal, which is at least as close to “Portugal” as “Portus Cale.” Oranges are in season in January in Lisbon, and they are so sweet and delicious that we each have one for desert after every meal. Imagine these were our conversations while contemplating Apollo’s fruit, peeled and open, spilling its juices onto plates as white as Lisbon’s white winter light. Imagine.

Wade Matthews

1. Oranges I – 08’43’’

2. Oranges II – 04’19’’

3. Oranges III – 02’33’’

4. Oranges IV – 04’50’’

5. Oranges V – 06’09’’

6. Oranges VI – 03’15’’

7. Oranges VII – 02’51’’

8. Oranges VIII – 08’17’’

9. Oranges IX – 02’07’’

Ernesto Rodrigues – Viola

Guilherme Rodrigues – Cello

Wade Matthews – Alto Flute, Bass Clarinet, Electronics

Bechir Saadé – Bass Clarinet, Nay

Recorded in January 2006, Lisbon,
Cover design Carlos Santos

https://ernestorodrigues.bandcamp.com/album/oranges

Reviews

Esta recente edição da Creative Sources Recordings (cs068) capta em estúdio um quarteto formado por Wade Matthews, Ernesto Rodrigues, Bechir Saadé e Guilherme Rodrigues. Em “Oranges” (temas 1 a 9, num total de 42’58’’) Wade Matthews arma teia e trama electrónica focada na criação de texturas, acidentes e rugosidades, por onde amarinham sons animados, pequenos pontos de luz que, vistos à distância, iluminam uma tela de consideráveis dimensões e traduzem a imensa quantidade de eventos sonos que aqui se produzem.
Clarinete baixo (Matthews e Saadé), nay, flauta alto, viola, violoncelo e electrónica estabelecem subtis ligações electroacústicas em cadeia, o sopro como espevitador de um fogo que arde lento, brasas sobre as cordas, alimentado por uma permanente e quase imperceptível variação dinâmica em que detalhes e fragmentos marcam a progressão no terreno, apelando à concentração do ouvinte. No seu constante processo de transmutação, os sons adquirem formas estranhas, uma certa fluidez e imponderabilidade, como gritos surdos e rumores em tensão permanente. Música parente da escrita contemporânea, que dela difere na medida em que os momentos de composição, execução e registo ocorrem simultânea e instantaneamente, fundindo-se numa delicada amálgama de sons e silêncios profundos. Gravação de Janeiro de 2006, realizada no Estúdio Tcha Tcha Tcha, em Lisboa. Eduardo Chagas (Jazz e Arredores)

Label owner Rodrigues in a compatible quartet creating textures of considerable dimensions in a minimal setting of acoustics and electronics. Squidco

[...] The first quartet is Wade Matthews (bass clarinet, alto flute, electronics), Ernesto Rodrigues (viola, and labelboss), Bechir Saade (bass clarinet, nay) and Guilherme Rodrigues (cello). Matthews presented his work before on a solo CD on the same label, and he played three concerts in Lisbon this year. There he met Bechir Saade from Beirut, and together with the two Rodriguez' they end up in a studio, recorded nine short improvisations. The music here is much more interesting: the instruments as objects, recorded with a very close microphone, sometimes electronically sounding and sometimes more conventional, makes this a very intense piece of music and a fine example of improvised music. Frans de Waard (Vital)

On Oranges The Rodrigues duo is back in action against with Bechir Saadé on bass clarinet and nây [an end-blown flute of Persian origin – DW] and Wade Matthews on alto flute, bass clarinet and electronics. The album is divided into nine movements in a kind of suite, if a far from uniform one, opening with beautiful Nikos Veliotis-like regretful string drones accompanied by discreet electronic backgrounds and the light crackle of wood, while Saadé's lingual flutters generate hisses and clicks. Elsewhere, lively microtonal activity is contrasted and enhanced by the strings' preparations and extended techniques, and there are spurts of insurgence from the repressed elastic warp and squelch of Matthews' electronics. The fifth movement is an engrossing juxtaposition of close intervals (and probably the best track in terms of emotional depth) which turns into airy multiphonics and koto icicles courtesy of Ernesto plucking in the red light district of his viola. The granular battle between subtraction and addition takes these daring improvisations into the kind of territory that could leave less seasoned explorers dying of starvation and dehydration within minutes. Massimo Ricci (Paris Transatlantic)

Layers of earthy cloths, loosely woven in continuous reels, individual threads harshly coloured by the variously contrasting elements present in a landscape of dessert ascendancy. The textures are revealed by the slowness of the pace, which magnifies dimensions, offering a close view of occasional languor akin to such climates. Pedro Lopez (Modisti)

Neuf plages de joutes électroacoustiques où règne une grande activité dans un faux calme, un son sec, un brin d'agitation... Dynamique et concentrée. Jerôme Noetinger (Metamkine)

Another electro acoustic display from the outer space, this time the matter is more and more fragmented thus don’t expect it to be a continuum ambient-style where instrumental sounds are assembled so to have a layering ambient style. Certainly in these nine tracks there’s a lot of interaction but is way more fragmented and many times you have every member of this quartet waiting for his turn in order to emit a the beloved sounds/noises. The electro-acoustic pastiches is the usual work you think of when pondering on the label’s catalogue and yes, it has its moments like in the fifth track where they move around a quasi modal type of improvisation and I can’t say I didn’t appreciate when they’ve molded something you could even recognize the shape of. “The shape of electro-acoustic nowadays” has a lot to share with the quality of the recording and this one is well done, consequently everything is located in a specifical context/space and can also be identified for it’s real essence. The last sentence means thanks to the recording every “sshhh””, “sdeeng”, “tuuud” is clearly identifiable and don’t think it happens quite often. Andrea Ferraris Chain DLK)

Nas liner notes deste disco o americano Wade Matthews, residente em Madrid, problematiza a questão da associação de cores à música. E interroga-se porque motivo o laranja é pouco referenciado nos meios musicais (salvando a notória excepção de “Orange Was the Colour of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk” de Charles Mingus). A cor de laranja é então o motivo que juntou a dupla Rodrigues (Ernesto na viola, Guilherme no violoncelo) ao americano Matthews (clarinete baixo, flauta e electrónicas) e ao libanês Bechir Saadé (clarinete baixo) numa sessão de improvisação em Lisboa. Este é mais um registo em que a expansividade de cada instrumentista acaba por ficar reservada, em favor de uma toada plena de quietude. Há certamente momentos em que as difusões individuais são incontornáveis, mas de modo geral a unidade colectiva acaba por prevalecer. Nuno Catarino (Bodyspace)