VAGAR: Cante Alentejano as you’ve never heard it before!

Saxophonist and composer Carlos Martins surprises with an approach that combines, for the first time in the history of our culture, Cante Alentejano and Mediterranean sounds through new compositions and improvisations. This work is the result of collaboration with writer José Luís Peixoto, photographer José Manuel Rodrigues (Pessoa Prize) and singers Hugo Bentes and Pedro Calado. These artists, all from Alentejo, thought together about what it means to be from Alentejo in today’s world, using music, words, and images to create a contemporary approach to Cante.

«Vagar is a manifesto for slowing down. It’s a gesture for the preservation and reinvention of Cante. Cante is alive on this album because its origins are alive in the voices of the singers. If we silenced the instruments, we could listen to Cante and recognise the traditional forms with which we are familiar. That was the condition for the singers to sing in Vagar, like a habitable frontier that we explored, deepening, and widening with each meeting, until it ceased to be a frontier and became common territory. We were able to listen to each other and reach “beyond”. Mediterranean culture, in its various expressions, from which Cante and a certain European way of improvising certainly derive, played a central role here by inspiring the musical structures, cells from which the instrumental writing flowed along with the voices. In Vagar our secret was to keep the initial uproar going, with silence watching over the clamour of the sun or the vehemence of the lime until all the light turned blue, “barely shaking the day”, in that sacred place that is the Alentejo. »  – Carlos Martins

«We were born inside this landscape, this accent, this time. The earth has a voice, we can hear it. The cork oaks, under the weight of their age, have a voice. The dead, generations in a row, have a voice. We can distinguish all these voices; they are carried by the breeze that also carries away the silence. But we’ve been to other lands, we’ve been far away, we’ve crossed the horizon. We crossed the plane and then we crossed the sea. We took what we had learned here, but we didn’t reject what others had to teach us there. And then we returned. We see the world through the filter of the Alentejo and we see Alentejo through the filter of the world. We are a choir of sounds-words-images, we have use for ancestral wisdom and for the instant of improvisation, of instinct. We know that the sea continues to the plane, and vice versa, one doesn’t exist without the other, they are the same thing. »  – José Luís Peixoto