Luis Lopes Humanization 4tet, Live in Madison

If you want to wake yourself up, you'd do well to check out the recent album by the Luis Lopes Humanization Quartet, Live in Madison (Ayler 134). It's a very hot quartet, in some ways an offshoot of Dennis Gonzalez's Yells at Eels band (more on that later this week). This quartet takes no prisoners, in that it is blazing a path of fire where it will and you get into it because you want some of that heat in your world, or that's what I am feeling anyway.

The mix of players is excellent. Two Portuguese heavies and the Gonzalez brothers from down Texas way. Luis Lopes leads the band and brings in three abstract-concrete compositions. He shows you what he's made of on electric guitar--fire and dry ice, blazing electric outness, inferno-maelstroms of sound.

His front-line partner is the always hot Rodrigo Amado on tenor (and one composition)--who sounds brilliant as he always seems to, getting that great big tenor sound and putting something on every note he plays. Like a master spitball pitcher, he starts in one place and then there is action you cannot predict but it ends in another not-always-expected end point. The combination of Rodrigo and Luis is as potent as any one-two punch around and they show why very convincingly here.

Then there are the Gonzalez brothers, sons of Dennis Gonzalez and becoming one of the hippest and most capable rhythm teams around today. Aaron is the world class bassist that gets the ostinatos into cruising mode with a big fat sound, can walk and solo with real authority and does here. He also contributes one of the compositions. Stefan combines hard-hitting strength with great chops for a busy swinging sound perfect to launch this quartet into outer space.

This is all about the four together in smoking space-mode. But it is also about the very together advanced playing of each individually. All of them are at the top as players with what is going on in advanced jazz with a rock edge. In tandem they are unbeatable.

In any way you care to look at this one, it's a big winner. It has the torque of rock, the unpredictability of outness and some really great improvisations and compositional launching points.

Get this!

Humanization 4tet "Electricity": Lopes, Amado and the Gonzalez Brothers Ring It In!

There are some CDs that are so charged with life, so immediate, so vibrant, that the music literally jumps out of your speakers from the first note. That's what I am feeling with the album Electricity (Ayler 113) by the Humanization 4tet.

This band has potency stockpiled in reserve. It's Luis Lopes on a very electric guitar, a player who knows how to create cosmic envelopes of sound and bring depth and space into a quartet such as this. Then there's Rodrigo Amado on tenor, who I've enthused about at length in the course of several reviews on the sister site, gapplegatemusicreview.blogspot.com. He has a terrific sound and abundant musical brains to realize some beautiful, fiery lines. The Gonzalez brothers, Aaron on bass and Stefan on drums, are long-time members of father Dennis's Yells at Eels (see the other site for a review or two of that band) and their lengthy tenure together has given them the kind of simpatico interaction that is rare these days. And they are great players to boot.

Electricity contains eight originals, all very stimulating vehicles for the players to launch off of. All four group members contribute worthy compositions.

And so to the music. It is totally modern, brimming over with life, and breathtaking in its combination of freedom and propulsion. It should make you a believer as to the strength of the quartet, individually and collectively. This is up there as a high point of the many new releases I've heard in the past year. Ring it in with the Humanization 4tet! It will be a great year if this is any indication.