Calcanhar - JUMP

2023

Leading figures from Porto’s vibrant jazz scene, saxophonist João Mortágua and pianist Carlos Azevedo, aka Calcanhar, announce their recording debut as a duo with the release of Jump, a full-of-beans feast of playful, telekinetic dialogue, chock-a-block with unfettered improvisations and freewheeling imaginative flights. Often divining inspiration from paintings and poems, Calcanhar opt here for a totally spontaneous approach, Mortágua and Azevdeo drawing on their backgrounds in jazz and classical music, as well as time spent together in the Mazam quartet (whose sophomore album, Pilgrimage, was issued on Clean Feed in 2022), to zero in via the prism of an intensely-focused one-hour recording session, the pair’s virtuosity and unquenchable creativity, refracted through a helter-skelter of hopscotching post-bop refrains, melancholic blues-indebted leitmotifs, and impish, infectious exchange.