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Triorganico in LA Weekly
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“Triorganico’s Fabiano do Nascimento is eating a sushi snack at the Los Feliz coffee shop we’re in. ...“Triorganico’s Fabiano do Nascimento is eating a sushi snack at the Los Feliz coffee shop we’re in. With his young man’s jet-black beard and the spotless, almost tuniclike white T-shirt he’s wearing, the gaunt guitarist looks like a particularly devout acolyte from a mystical school, or at the very least like someone who would have been given a hard time by airport security around early 2002. It’s the eyes, really — in a town rife with shallow operators, those unusually serious eyes of his mark him as a dedicated believer.
Though he might in conversation refer to spiritual and political matters, Nascimento’s intensity of purpose is entirely at the service of one thing: his music, which he calls “a universal sound,” spreading from his native Brazil through the improv-jazz scene in New York to the bohemian enclaves of East Los Angeles and the more unlikely practice rooms of Orange County.
Nascimento left Brazil a decade ago, at 15, relocating to Costa Mesa to live near his older half-brother, Dave Orlando. Orlando, celebrated as a DJ for his pioneering Dub Club nights, expanded Nascimento’s musical horizons through his impeccably curated record collection, turning him on to Fela Kuti and chaperoning him through the underground of O.C. groovers and hip music cognoscenti.
Local genre-busting soul singer Aloe Blacc quickly spotted Nascimento as a guitar virtuoso who was deadly serious about his instrument (again, those eyes), hyping him to everyone in his L.A. label crew. The Stones Throw family — Peanut Butter Wolf, Madlib et al. — were duly impressed. “Here’s this lanky Brazilian kid,” says Stones Throw manager and dapper scene maker Egon Alapatt, “playing his weird seven-string guitar with Aloe, and we’re all blown away.”
…
Blacc passed the CD on to Alapatt at Stones Throw. The band protested that this was “raw stuff, demos,” but Alapatt, who single-handedly runs Stones Throw’s soul-funk reissue label, Now-Again, heard a kindred spirit in the recordings. “They were rough and raw,” explains Alapatt, who knows Brazilian music, “the way things used to be” (no slouchy compliment coming from one of the greatest Brazil-head crate-diggers in the world!). Alapatt talked the band into releasing it as-is, and the result is Convivência, a little-promoted gem of a record that could only have been produced in the progressive melting pot that is today’s Los Angeles.
Influential magazine Waxpoetics, along with the many online music writers who have been spreading the word about Convivência, is hailing it as a modern-day bossa nova classic, “something you’d expect to hear floating from a smoky bossa nova club in the 1950s — not downtown L.A.” ”
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Triorganico: Convivencia
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Triorganico’s debut effort Convivencia is—simply put—a work of remarkable beauty. The trio trades in...Triorganico’s debut effort Convivencia is—simply put—a work of remarkable beauty. The trio trades in highly emotive bossa-tinged instrumentals that are equally capable of taking listeners on a trip down the coasts of South America and invoking deep introspection. Transcendent finger-picked tropical guitar, colorful woodwinds and tastefully light Latin percussion are the core musical elements of the group. A wonderful sense of gorgeous melancholy and delightful uplift permeates the record; arpeggiated minor guitar chords anchor the melody while the sounds of congas, muted ride cymbals, saxophones and flutes provide playful accents. Triorganico manages to achieve that improbable balance between dark and light tones while still maintaining the vibrancy and looseness of their music. The fine musicianship of each member is well represented here. “Correndo” showcases guitarist Fabiano de Nascimento’s virtuosity in playing Spanish rhythms with the emotional poignancy of folk music. “After Thought” finds woodwind specialist Pablo Calogero coaxing heartbreaking melodies from his sax while percussionist Ricardo “Tiki” Pasillas ratchets up the urgency and intensity of the piece with his rhythmic touch. Convivencia allows listeners to finally eavesdrop on these three masterful players engaging in a passionate musical conversation.
—Amorn Bholsangngam
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Os Hermeticos: Triorganico
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By Gustavo Turner Tuesday, Sep 15 2009
Triorganico’s Fabiano do Nascimento is eating a sushi snack ...By Gustavo Turner Tuesday, Sep 15 2009
Triorganico’s Fabiano do Nascimento is eating a sushi snack at the Los Feliz coffee shop we’re in. With his young man’s jet-black beard and the spotless, almost tuniclike white T-shirt he’s wearing, the gaunt guitarist looks like a particularly devout acolyte from a mystical school, or at the very least like someone who would have been given a hard time by airport security around early 2002. It’s the eyes, really — in a town rife with shallow operators, those unusually serious eyes of his mark him as a dedicated believer.
Triorganico
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More About
Pablo CalogeroHermeto PascoalEgon AlapattLatin MusicUnderground Hip-Hop
Though he might in conversation refer to spiritual and political matters, Nascimento’s intensity of purpose is entirely at the service of one thing: his music, which he calls “a universal sound,” spreading from his native Brazil through the improv-jazz scene in New York to the bohemian enclaves of East Los Angeles and the more unlikely practice rooms of Orange County.
Nascimento left Brazil a decade ago, at 15, relocating to Costa Mesa to live near his older half-brother, Dave Orlando. Orlando, celebrated as a DJ for his pioneering Dub Club nights, expanded Nascimento’s musical horizons through his impeccably curated record collection, turning him on to Fela Kuti and chaperoning him through the underground of O.C. groovers and hip music cognoscenti.
Local genre-busting soul singer Aloe Blacc quickly spotted Nascimento as a guitar virtuoso who was deadly serious about his instrument (again, those eyes), hyping him to everyone in his L.A. label crew. The Stones Throw family — Peanut Butter Wolf, Madlib et al. — were duly impressed. “Here’s this lanky Brazilian kid,” says Stones Throw manager and dapper scene maker Egon Alapatt, “playing his weird seven-string guitar with Aloe, and we’re all blown away.”
You might guess that a young performer who suddenly finds himself fraternally inducted into scenes like Dub Club and fawned over by the coolest alt-hip-hop and soul-jazz cats in the Southland would probably spend most of his time noodling away in some incense-drenched hill house surrounded by sandaled Zooey Deschanel clones. Not Nascimento. In his downtime between Stones Throw gigs, he cultivated a personal and musical friendship with Pablo Calogero, a 40-something woodwind virtuoso originally from the Bronx who cut his teeth with Tito Puente, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie, and witnessed the birth of hip-hop and new wave with his close pal Jean-Michel Basquiat.
After the demise of the salsa-jazz scene in New York in the mid-1990s, the much-in-demand Calogero relocated to Los Angeles to concentrate on his “upside-down creative music.” Shortly after Calogero settled here, a fresh-off-the-plane teenage Nascimento came into his life during a break at one of his gigs. Calogero was skeptical, but as soon as the kid started playing, something in his mind clicked, and he knew he had found a like-minded musical partner.
Through regular gigs at places like the Baked Potato and Pete’s Café downtown — and, more crucially, patient woodshedding in Calogero’s garage — the two musicians initially developed a guitar-flute thing and devoted themselves to finding an organic fusion between their very different Latin styles. While Los Angeles obviously has a rich tradition of Mexican-influenced Latin music, Calogero’s Nuyorican background was missing “lo Africano.” His jams with this intense youngster from Brazil conjured up that blackness.
The catalyst for these collaborations was a strange little songbook, almost completely unknown in the U.S., by the towering Brazilian jazz composer Hermeto Pascoal. Calogero and Nascimento both fell under the spell of the unusual Calendário do Som, the calendar of sound, a set of 366 short instrumental scores written by Pascoal in 1996 and published the following year to astonishing responses. The rich compositions in Pascoal’s calendar — allegedly a cross between a diary and an offering of a “birthday song” for everybody — served as a springboard for the duo’s garage sessions.
Soon, word of Nascimento and Calogero’s collaboration circulated among the tight-knit local Latin-music community. Several percussionists passed through Calogero’s garage, playing with them there and at their sporadic gigs, until the duo realized that the gifted Tiki Pasillas was playing so consistently with them that they might as well be a trio. “The trio is a really strong formation,” says Calogero. “It’s like Picasso’s painting of the three musicians — clarinet, guitar, percussionist. It’s very mobile, but also everyone has to be really responsible.”
After recording several Calendário songs in Calogero’s garage studio, the newly christened Triorganico branched off into original material inspired by Pascoal’s scores, variations on them, songs by other cult Brazilian composers, like Baden Powell and Moacir Santos, and even short “cositas,” little pieces that they thought perhaps didn’t amount to a whole song but were too interesting to throw away. A selection from all this work was made into a homemade CD, which Nascimento excitedly showed to Blacc.
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Triorganico
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Triorganico - "Tempo De Amor" (Convivencia)
Breezy and sultry, the pop side of Brazil’s bossa n...Triorganico - "Tempo De Amor" (Convivencia)
Breezy and sultry, the pop side of Brazil’s bossa nova conquered the world in the early 1960s. But bossa was always steeped in jazz and a sense of adventure; and from that there also grew a more experimental and radical ethos – giving the world artists like Baden Powell, Bola Sete, Airto Moreira, Egberto Gismonti and the master of Brazilian jazz iconoclasm, Hermeto Pascoal. The young musicians of Triorganico play acoustic music rooted in that ethos of adventure, managing to sound fresh and energetic while paying homage to their roots.
A good part of that freshness and energy comes from how well these guys play together. Interplay, counterpoint and responsive listening imbue Convivencia with an appealing sense of surprise and invention. The pieces are mostly originals in an impressionistic Brazilian jazz vein: melodic, chromatic, rich in changing mood, and surging with samba-esque rhythms.
Each member of the trio seems an equal voice. Guitarist Fabiano Do Nascimento has a supple command of his seven-string guitar, providing the crucial passing chords and rhythmic pulse with elegance, and also bringing deliciously longing saudade and emotional presence to his lyrical lines. Pablo Calogero’s flute is mercurial and dignified all at once, and his bass flute and clarinet bring unique and hypnotic colors and textures to ensemble lines. Drummer and percussionist Ricardo “Tiki” Pasillas might well be the reason the band is called Triorganico. His work here has all the “nature boy” colorations and textures of a Nana Vasconcelos; meanwhile the ever-changing but always solid accents of his trap work suggest a Brazilian Tony Williams.
It should also be noted that Convivencia is so well-recorded. There’s a high-resolution intimacy that puts the listener right in a small room with the trio – along with an attention to sonic detail and texture that echoes the most energized and adventurous ECM albums of the 1970s. Yet for all the echoes of the past, Triorganico displays enough verve and commitment to sound as if they’re inventing something new.
By Kevin Macneil Brown
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Breezy rhythms
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Triorganico: Nana + Tempo De Amor
From Convivencia (Now Again, 2009)
Considering the “alternativ...Triorganico: Nana + Tempo De Amor
From Convivencia (Now Again, 2009)
Considering the “alternative” label Now Again is, “Convivencia” might be the most “alternative” release in their catalog yet. It's part of the “new” Now Again for lack of a better explanation. Whereas they previously were known primarily for their reissues of regional soul from yesteryear, the label has really reshuffled their image over the last 18 months. New music from the likes of afrofunk musicians Karl Hector and the Malcouns (a side project of Jan Whitefield) and Mr. Chop with his spacey brand of psychedelic funk can be an easily understood extension of the preconceived notion of the Now Again brand. Their latest release from acoustic latin jazz trio Triorganico showcases the label's refusal to be categorized as a one-trick pony.
Fabiano Do Nascimento gently strums his seven string guitar while Ricardo “Tiki” Pasillas provides the backbeat with syncopated percussion and Pablo Calogero woos you with various flutes and woodwind friends such as soprano sax and bass clarinet. Working like a singing group who could whisk you away with a breezy serenade by any of its members, the bandmates shift gears of lead instruments working as a harmonious conglomerate. No one overpowers their counterparts and instead choose to work cohesively as a unit.
“Tempo De Amor,” in its seven-and-a-half minutes, builds into a jam frenzy. Starting out lightly with a tantric guitar riff and Tiki's jaunty percussion, Pablo teases you with little flute stabs here and there before coming front and center to lead the pack. Midway through, Tiki starts to pick up the pace, feeding off Pablo's billowy breaths of bliss.
Aside from the lengua del amor, they also tackle Moacir Santos' “Nanã.” It's one of two Santos numbers they perform on the album, both with a bossa flair. Pablo trades in his flute for a bass clarinet to guide the rhythm that sways your hips. Like dance partners who have been performing together for years, the trio really dance about well with one another on this track, especially between the guitar and clarinet, moving in sync with their proverbial footwork.
The album, I must say, is an excellent companion to the latest Waxpoetics (issue 36), the Brazil issue. Pop in the Triorganico CD (or vinyl), sit back on the couch or favorite recliner, and get lost in the rhythms from south of the equator – which, when I think about it, is not a bad way to spend the evening after a long day of working for the man.
Labels: brazilian, jazz, latin, new music
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