Jazz
European Echoes · 3 July 2026
David Maranha’s electric organ comes in from the first bar with a slightly dissonant hum and never leaves: it is the surface across which the forty-one minutes and twenty-two seconds of “Desolation Row” pass, a single track with no internal divisions. Rodrigo Amado’s tenor sails above it with a big sound and a very clean attack, and only two or three times in the whole journey does he push the mechanics of the instrument hard enough to draw noise out of it.
This is a live recording. Pedro Freixo captured it at ADAO in Barreiro on 3 October 2025, during the twenty-second edition of OUT.FEST, organised by the OUT.RA association, and both musicians share the mix and the production; Dave Zuchowski mastered it and Stuart Broomer wrote the liner notes. The digital edition came out on 3 July and the limited CD on European Echoes on 7 August.
The duo had already released “Wrecks” on 25 October 2024, and the difference shows immediately: here Amado plays with a more melodic hand and Maranha draws a less abrasive sound out of the organ, so what was a wall there is a current here. The piece makes one long ascent, spreads out through the middle without hurrying and closes with a stretch of tension that dissolves abruptly into very gentle final bars.
What does not move across that long hour is the harmony. Maranha holds the same harmonic field from the first note to the last, and that loads the entire responsibility for change onto the saxophone: when Amado breathes, the music does not breathe with him, it keeps rolling the same way. Across forty minutes of live playing that asymmetry makes the record lean on a single voice more than suits a duo, and it shows most in the central stretch, the longest and the one where least happens.
Rating: 7.9/10
Text by Aina Torrents