AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS
EDITION: (Cd Liner Notes) Karonte Records DATE: November 2001
A work may form part of the content of a project, it may be seen as the model for creation, synthesising lifetime's
experiences. The artist becomes a figure facing his creation and there are lessons to be learnt form this apparent
coherence - incomplete, deficient, contradictory, inconsequential, mutating or virtual lessons.
Without trying to be exhaustive or to relate this choice to excessively rigid criteria, “Nai” by “Baldo Martinez”
reveals some of the musical approaches that are being widely expressed in jazz by musicians of European origin
who follow such patterns of communicational interaction. Looking at titles of the different compositions and the
way they follow on from each other (O conxuro, Pixages Galaicas, Los Mundos de Argos, de Norte a Sur, O paso
de tempo, Galería de recuerdos, and Camino de Bretún), we note the marked presence of a lengthy “sentimental
journey”, of a place that is timeless, a space where is nothing to hide, nothing to store, and therefore nothing to
conceal.
This music contradicts that comfortable feeling of regional, cultural, ethnic, world monumentality. It seems to
deny authority, the power of a past directing the present, because it rejects any inherited legacy and establishes
links exclusively with its own situation. The double bass is a turntable around which the excellent, careful
compositions turn in sequence, with their complex arrangements and selected rhythms. The versatility of this
music can be seen in the way it forms a chain, following a pattern of healthy dismantling of sound. In principle,
every idea should “go against something”, but we must not forget all the writers who never get tired of writing the
same book or the artists who spend the whole of their lives creating the same work. There is a singularity and
fragility in the pleasant differences which are gradually perfected in between two repeats.
Based on exploratory formulae characterised by a spiritual opening-up in the creative and experimental process
and the sort of multi-disciplinary concept that should always be taken into consideration, the results achieved are
a preview to strange interactions amongst the various components of today's reality - concept versus technology.
There isn't therefore a process dividing each one of the tracks. Arrangements that are made by establishing links
with a historical analysis of events to provide the man of this century with a means of understanding will only
result in inadaptation and an emptiness that cannot help to reveal a new order.
As with all art, jazz suffers from an inter-subjectivity that essentially depends on personal freedom and on the
capacity to express individuality as if it were the ultimate solitude. All attempts at redefinition and all activities of
classification end up as borderline acts, limits imposed to help rationalise territories and thus the perceived
artistic phenomena as absolute, final and recognisable objects.
The permanent mutation of conclusive musical models is clear in the capacity for indetermination and in the
figurative linking of the innumerable variables that can become creative moments in the field of jazz. Therefore,
analysis based on filing techniques or chronological organizations are here not applicable. As an art, jazz has the
faculty of relating to all arts and vice versa. If this were not so, it would be something different. One who doesn't
remember this, is on a plane on which artistic “being” becomes (im)possible.
