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Jazz Articles » Album Review » Felipe Salles: Camera Obscura
“I’ve been wanting to do a project like this for decades,” Amherst-based Brazilian composer and multi-reedist Felipe Salles writes of Camera Obscura. The album combines jazz and classical quartets in a program of original music inspired by the physical phenomenon of the same name, which has intrigued artists and thinkers worldwide since the Stone Age. A camera obscura is created when light passes through a pinhole into a dark chamber, projecting an upside-down-and-backwards image onto an inside wall. In translating this visual circumstance into a sonic one, Salles grapples with ways to create multiple perspectives and manifest light and darkness musically.
“Just like a photographer plays with exposure, colors, sharpness, or even how a picture is cropped,” he writes in the liner notes, “I can reshape or reframe a melodic line by changing its underlying harmony, instrumentation, and rhythmic phrasing.” On “Perspective,” he does just that. Embedding a classical string quartet into the instrumentation provides a clear way to differentiate between vantage points, timbrally and stylistically. Strings predominate in some passages, the full ensemble in others. Elsewhere, soloists seem to narrate, Salles rising above the ensemble with his soprano or pianist
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data-original-title=”” title=””>Nando Michelin holding forth in a pared-down texture, elucidating an elusive tango feel.
Salles is a strong and sensitive player with a broad palette and an individualized sound, enhanced by his doubles: soprano and tenor saxophones, piccolo, flute, alto flute, bass flute, clarinet and bass clarinet. He applies all of these to his musical canvas, using them in various ways: in contrapuntal commentary, in over-dubbed sections, and in features such as his lovely alto flute solo on the “À Deriva,” an exquisite vocal composition that sets Helena Tabatchnik’s haunting poem about living on the edge, able to sleep only in the arms of a friend.
Camera Obscura resonates with the work of flutist-pianist-composer
