Telectu consists of pianist Jorge Lima Barreto and guitarist and electro-acoustic wizard Vitor Rua. Together, they are the new music duo from Portugal, and have been wreaking creative anarchy since 1981. In 2000 they added soprano saxophonist Tom Chant to the mix and expanded their sound, looking to create a quartet with maximum fluidity and changeability. They decided to do this by not having a fixed drummer. The three CDs in
Quartettos mark the mining of that vein with three of the finest improvising -- and musical -- drummers on the planet:
Sunny Murray, Eddie Prevost, and
Gerry Hemingway. Of the three, only one can be considered a musical "theorist" (Prevost), but even here, compared to the sometimes dry academic soundscape records
Telectu has made, he sounds like a swing machine. What is most remarkable about this set is how the band sounds like a completely different unit with each drummer. With
Murray, textures and dynamics are explored toward an absolutely multilingual cathartic end. With Prevost, notions of space and time are explored against an intertexuality of language and tonality. Chant and Barreto offer counterpoint exercises to one another in a subtly restrained manner, giving Prevost the room to interpret both ways as Rua colors the sound and interjects guitar lines and chords to ornament the edges. On the third disc with
Hemingway, waves of raw emotion are tempered with harmonic interpolations from Chant and line tags by Barreto that become a kind of moving lyric suite, shimmered and danced upon by
Hemingway's understated cymbal work. It moves through one melodic invention after another while retaining its willingness to devolve into chaos at any moment, though it never does; it remains beautiful, ghostly, and serene throughout.
Telectu has proven itself as a trio to be reckoned with on the world scene, with this release in particular revealing the group's ability to work in such diverse settings and achieve such startlingly original and compelling results. ~ Thom Jurek