Ernesto Rodrigues - viola
Guilherme Rodrigues - cello
Nuno Torres- alto saxophone
Eduardo Chagas - trombone
Carlos Santos - computer

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In his book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, Roland Barthes describes the two kinds of fruition that a literary text can bring us: one is the pleasure effect (“plaisir”), and the other is bliss (“jouissance”, with all the erotic connotations coming from the word, lost somewhere in the translation into English). Our relation with the first one is passive, but to feel “jouissance” you have to make an active effort, almost as if you’re writing (or re-writing) what you read.
Even if literature and music are very different domains, the same distinction can be made when listening to this recording in particular, and to the music of Ernesto Rodrigues in general: you have to stop all other activities and immerse yourself in those sounds to obtain the maximal results from it. You’ll need to give yourself away and to focus in order to perceive it all. This is not music for entertainment or to give you an atmosphere for rest and for conversation. You have to be there, right in the middle, like you’re one of the musicians, sweating with them.
Soon you’ll understand that what you hear is different from everybody else’s personal experiences of the same musical creation (or the same text, because a composition is a text and to improvise music – the case in point – is just another way to compose, or to write). What you hear isn’t what the musicians playing hear individually. You’re an independent, complete being, with your own hearing capacities, your own nervous central system, your musical habitudes and your cultural baggage. In truth, you’re re-playing the music in your mind, and it’s that feeling which sends you to a state of bliss, either sensuous, spiritual or both. Do you dare to try it now?

Rui Eduardo Paes
(music writer)