So, this new album Travelling Light by Rafael Toral, an absolute favourite artist at OBLADADA – framed as a collection of jazz standards, had me thinking it might be a tiny bit underwhelming. For the first time ever in decades of listening to the Portuguese artist’s work, before hearing a note, I recognised most of the titles. I had a broad familiarity with them from versions that I’d heard before. My so-so attitude towards more popular jazz, briefly took hold.
But extremely quickly I reminded myself any such notion here is ridiculous – this is, after all Rafael Toral we are talking about.
Many of Toral’s previous albums have clearly taken elements of jazz forms and collided them with various electronic and feedback elements. The more than a decade long series of his Space Program, standalone albums like Moon Field and Saturn, and many more, all clearly blending these elements together in new and ever exploratory settings.
Last year’s absolute masterpiece Spectral Evolution (and the companion release Spectral Evolution Live) grew around chunks of standards like George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm and Duke Ellington’s Take the “A” Train. Clusters of notes, chords, and phrases – lifted from music history that simply provide a launch pad for the extended droning magnificence of his electronic modules, creating a uniquely powerful psychedelic form of ambience.
Travelling Light takes this progression to its next logical form, certainly the most musically explicit he’s ever been. Lightly dusted in contributions from clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe and flautist Clara Saleiro, building another set of co-ordinates to blossom into new angles and reflections. Travelling Light is a more detailed, up-close form of world building, the next era after Spectral Evolution’s kosmic birthing process.
It takes only a few seconds for any remaining uncertainly to vaporise as Easy Living swells into view. A dreamy far-off haze of future nostalgia rolling into solidity. We are then seamlessly absorbed into Solitude as curtains of guitar ascend through throbbing zones like angels.
Toral’s sonic fingerprints, those unmistaken feedback swirls and twists, curl around Body And Soul, where even pockets of silence radiate warmth. A sax eventually rises out the stew but quickly it’s sonic edges tear as the sound buffets in the thick atmospherics.
These first three tracks, Side A, feel like a suite where it’s clear Toral is inside this music, somehow pushing things we all recognise – into columns of something near celestial. This is the soundtrack of flying over clouds, horizons bending away from you for hundreds of miles in every direction.
You Don’t Know What Love Is and My Funny Valentine both feel more unadorned – a guitar swimming in a grid of waves, drifts, light beams and silence peeks in at various edges. Both tracks forming yet another platform in the whole, before the agitated warbling of God Bless The Child somehow re-saturates and elevates into a choir of Shepard tones. Then like a crack in the sky, a flute tumbles into the scene before earth-bound flares and fizzes of electricity slowly reconnect you to the ground.
Travelling Light as a title seems incredibly fitting here as you are returned to wherever you happened to be listening. As a step on from Spectral Evolution, Toral has moved closer to recognisable music whilst still retaining his unique approach. Packing only what he needs, only utilising the bare minimum to still somehow describe everything in impossibly rich detail.
These 6 tracks contain a huge chunk of living breathing human history, drawn in sounds that bathe your brain in the ghosts of familiarity, but also overflowing with sonic phenomena. The trick though is that this is an immaculate balancing act.
Whilst in a way it’s the most normal record he’s made in over 35 years, it’s still utterly alien, whilst still impossibly full of warmth and love.
A new type of amazing, all over again.
Travelling Light is out 24 October on Drag City Records, digitally, on CD and x2LP here and here
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