Personnel:
Gonzalo del Val (d), Abe Rábade (p), Masa Kamaguchi (b)
Reference: FSRCD 5160
Bar code: 8427328651608
Gonzalo del Val has developed and composed “Últimas Rondas” while glimpsing the imminence of a change of course in his artistic voyage. Let it be said up front that a presumed end of a cycle would not be marked by physical, creative or existential exhaustion, but rather by the certainty that the terrain has already been sufficiently explored: both the most purist enclaves, with works such as “Cancionero, Standards in Dublin, Tornaviaje” or “Koiné,” and the blurred margins where jazz standards are fused with the voice and the popular reminiscences that nestle within the songs of “Lamentos Mestizos.”
This twilight horizon does not strip “Últimas Rondas” of a single gram of ambition. On the contrary. This set of 6 pieces behaves like yet another full-fledged attempt to transcend that predestination —that curse, that ghost, we dare to say— which haunts every artist, whatever their discipline, according to which they are condemned to compose a single masterpiece, around which allthe others orbitin the background. Without going any further, any listener who has followed Del Val’s career will experience here the shift in sound he imparts to his instrument, irrefutable proof of his search for other forms of expression.
So with this record we are witnessing notthe ruins of a dream, but a genuine clash oftitans, in which that impregnable predestination and an artistin his maturity —one who knows himself equal to the occasion— do battle. We would be lying if we said that each of the city-named pieces that make up “Últimas Rondas” evokes a ring in which this no-holds-barred fight is staged anew, or that the sequence of the pieces conceals a cabalistic formula for winning the bout. Let us not get ahead of ourselves. The order of this album’s tracks responds to strictly musical criteria, and conveys no message nor harbours any discourse; were it to have one, it would be compositional —poetic, let us say— but never rethorical.
That said, over this non-negotiable order traced by the aesthetic engineering of this great drummer and composer, an itinerary spontaneously emerges, one that comes to cohabit with the former while taking on a life ofits own. An itinerary that winds through the whirlwind of aromas, encounters and visions that each city, like a vortex, absorbs, grinds and expels. Let us not lose sight of the fact that it is precisely in cities, under the strictest notion of urbanity, that Del Val has been finding and cooking up —here and in his earlier works— all the ingredients that allow him to sustain a complete dialogue between spirit, experience and creation.
—Oscar Escudero
