ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Mario Laginha
Jangada
Edition Records
★★★★
The Portuguese pianist Mario Laginha, born in Lisbon in 1960, describes his new album which he calls Jangada (or Raft) as the result of a creative process of “picking up pieces of driftwood and binding them together to form a whole.”
With bassist Bernardo Moreira and drummer Alexandre Frazao, he does just that with his pianism, forging a record of delights from fragments of sound, with a touch that reminds me of the great American pianist Ran Blake, who once made an album called Driftwoods.
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