Distant Country

The new album by João Paulo Esteves da Silva, Distant Country, is a doubly important milestone in the Portuguese music scene: on the one hand, it marks 30 years of recordings by the composer-pianist, whose debut under his own name, Endless Mountain Range, dates from 1995; on the other, it inaugurates the new Artway Jazz catalogue, an Artway Editions imprint that promises to become a reference for national jazz. Recorded at La Buissonne studio in the south of France, Distant Country features a newly formed quartet, with Julian Argüelles on tenor and soprano saxophones, Rodrigo Correia on double bass and José Salgueiro on drums. The repertoire includes both pieces by Esteves da Silva and a series of collective improvisations with great compositional focus. Crossing sounds such as Portuguese jazz, European jazz, avant-garde jazz, classical music or rock, this album can be seen as an extraordinarily concise synthesis of the vast universe of the composer-pianist, pointed out by his peers as one of the most original figures in European music of recent decades.