Sirius - Acoustic Main Suite plus The Inner One

Two generations gather in this surprising project: from one side a young Swazi born trumpeter who is committed to bring Africa to the Portuguese free music scene, Yaw Tembe, and from the other a veteran percussionist / objects manipulator, Monsieur Trinité (Francisco Trindade), a former emigrant in Paris who brought home the Situationist concepts he discovered in France.

Nothing on their respective careers prepared us for the music of the duo Sirius, which we can describe as a psychedelic kind of improvised music. Tembe is involved in bands like Zarabatana, with its tribalistic approach to free jazz (he calls it «dirty garage world jazz»), and Gume, a  mix of hard bop with other ancestral forms of the african diaspora such as the afro-cuban Rumba to the haitian Rara, also collaborating with the “weird folk” guitarist Norberto Lobo.

Trinité played in the Seventies with Carlos “Zíngaro”, as a member of the non-idiomatic violinist’s band Plexus, and later he was associated with two other key figures in Portugal in what concerns creative jazz and minimalist improvisation,Ernesto Rodrigues and Sei Miguel ( who as producer plays a pivotal role on the conception of the album) .

A man of many projects (Welcome to Silkeborg, Dark Magus – a tribute to Miles Davis –, Psico-Free & Manicômio, etc.), none of them has something like we hear in “Acoustic Main Suite plus The Inner One”: imagine Bill Dixon with the resonance of the National Pantheon, in Lisbon, where the recording took place, in a ethereal proto-musik journey with percussive drones all along, and you’ll still be far from this welcomed proposal. It’s different from everything else you heard before and it’s so beautiful you’ll want to listen to it again and again and again.