Based in Rotterdam, Lama offers an unusual mix of sensibilities, a trio of Portuguese and Canadian musicians that works at the intersections of film noir, cool jazz, electronica, and free improvisation. Gonçalo Almeida plays bass, effects, and loops, and is the principal composer; Susana Santos Silva plays trumpet, flugelhorn, and electronics; they’re joined by drummer Greg Smith, a Canadian who toured Europe with Toronto’s Shuffle Demons in the mid-’90s and decided to stay in Holland. The music is continually engaging, mining the familiar in oddly surprising ways and maintaining the dream theme of the title track throughout, even in the way it frames aggressive polyrhythmic interplay among the three musicians on The Chimpanzee Who Told Man How to Cry. Almeida’s Alguidar introduces the pattern of continuous transformation beginning in drone-like loops of bowed bass and rubato trumpet long-tones before Santos Silva’s spiky, splintering trumpet becomes the lead voice in a charging, jazz-based improvisation. The group’s identity is constructed in such shifts: Almeida and Santos Silva are both highly lyrical acoustic players, but the playful electronics actually make their sounds more personal. Smith continuously brings flexibility and an explosive immediacy to a music that is at once liberating and nostalgic, something like the film music of Nino Rota.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.