MARA & NANÁ VASCONCELOS “Ntsano”

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ARTIST

Mara & Naná Vasconcelos

ALBUM TITLE

“Ntsano”

LABEL

Red Records

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Red Records’ reissue series is further enriched by this LP, recorded in 1983, whose significance may be better understood with the help of a brief historical overview. Vasconcelos, who was in Canada at the time, had come into contact with the Mara collective, based in Québec City. Hébert, Bouchard and Tanguay formed a singular ensemble that brought together shared ways of life and artistic aspirations, jazz and minimalism, spirituality and tribal impulses, alongside projects involving theatre productions and early music. It is easy to understand, then, how such a distinctive “bubble” exerted an irresistible attraction on the musician from Recife, who was then at the height of his creative trajectory. Saudades dates from 1979, while the same year in which Ntsano was recorded also marked the end of the recording cycle of Codona, the supergroup formed with Don Cherry and Colin Walcott.

The resulting recording fully deserves its place among the most singular and least easily categorised encounters of the percussionist’s artistic career. Different creative axes converge in this music with extraordinary fluidity, spanning jazz, the avant-garde and imaginary folk. Moreover, the element that binds them together – and one that remains strikingly relevant today – is sound, understood not as saturation but as “pure form”, and therefore as an essential part of a relationship with emptiness and silence.

Codona, whose definitive expressive maturity came, as already noted, roughly at the same time as Vasconcelos’ encounter with Mara, had crystallised a transcultural ritual: in that rarefied music, improvisation and spirituality were inseparable, and Vasconcelos’ sound – which would later often find itself transformed and hollowed out through a regrettable process of objectification – was at its purest: atmospheric colour, breath, landscape.

The music on this album, however, shifts sideways from that matrix, finding itself alongside different partners and different sounds, within a cultural sphere far removed from folk and closer to a minimalist conception of cycle, iteration and variation, as well as to trance and certain echoes of esoteric psychedelia. Yet its distance from more grandiose and celebrated artistic paths is more apparent than real. After all, Vasconcelos had articulated a principle for life when he said: “I play more when I don’t play.”

Thus, in the slow, almost hollowed-out cycles of Ntsano, we encounter that same silence and a measured resonance, like a knot suspended in space. The remaining formal elements become almost an emotional evocation: what truly matters is the musicians’ mutual listening. Precisely because of its episodic and unrepeatable nature, and its luminous, subtle fragility, this album deserved to be reissued. Red Records has done so, transforming it – as so often happens with the label – into a precious, timeless object as well.

Highly recommended, as only rare things can be.

Sandro Cerini

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