Jazz
defkaz · 1 June 2026
Only one of the six improvisations starts with the saxophone. Mark Corroto points it out in All About Jazz and it’s the fact that organises everything else: in a trio fronted by a saxophonist, “Electric Bacchanalia” (eleven forty-one) is the only piece that begins where you would expect. The other five are set going by Elliott Sharp, Cyro Baptista or both at once, and the tenor comes in once there’s ground to stand on.
The numbers are those of a long-haul record: sixty-seven minutes, six tracks, five of them past the ten-minute mark and the longest, “Sacred Geometry of the Tropics”, fourteen seventeen. It was recorded, mixed and mastered under one roof, Parkwest Studios in Brooklyn, with Jim Clouse at the desk, in October 2024. The Greek label defkaz put it out on 1 June, produced by Iannis Koufaelas. Sharp plays an eight-string electric; Baptista brings percussion and voice.
The meeting goes back a long way. Perelman and Baptista are both from São Paulo and had already recorded together in the nineties: Corroto recalls “Man of the Forest” (1994), “Brazilian Watercolour” (1999) and “Aquarela do Brazil” (1999). Perelman and Sharp have released two duos on Mahakala Music, “Artificial Intelligence” in 2023 and “Trifecta” this year. The three of them together had never been taped.
The label itself quotes Bill Meyer in The Wire on its own page, saying that Baptista’s vocalising pulls Perelman closer to the music of his birthplace than he usually goes. The observation stands, and it also marks the record’s limit: the titles already carry the Amazon, the bacchanal and the tropics, and the six pieces are built almost identically, with an instrumental opening that lays the ground and a tenor that occupies it. “Disordered Continuum”, six oh five, is the only track that breaks the mould, and it’s the last of them.
The album is named after the thirty-sided polygon. The three of them had never been in a studio together before October 2024, and this is the only record of it.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents