Like Billy Corgan with a Big Muff or Jimi Hendrix with a Crybaby, L.A. saxophonist Sam Gendel long ago figured out how to turn a commercial piece of hardware into something personal and immediate. In his case, it’s a battery of reverb, synth emulators, and effects pedals that, when he’s at his most dialed-in, can make his horn sound like both Rahsaan Roland Kirk on “The Inflated Tear” and Tom Morello on “Killing in the Name.” It’s a discombobulating sound that’s become ubiquitous in the L.A. jazz and experimental scenes over the past decade. Listen to a handful of songs he’s been on and you’ll know it instantly: Like backmasked speech, it feels both inside-out and strangely familiar.
It’s simply strange, then, to hear a Sam Gendel record in which the saxophone sounds familiar. There are no effects on The Room, his new duo album with seven-string guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento. There’s no percussion, either—save for a bit of breath-scatting Gendel puffs through his horn in the lovely “Astral Flowers”—or any of the bleary production effects that can make Gendel’s records sound like they were recorded by the light of an old desktop monitor. Nascimento’s recent albums—2023’s Das Nuvens and Mundo Solo—is dotted with drum machines and bushy synths, but he’s long taken his cues from the crisp and tidy jazz of ECM and the close-mic’d sambas of João Gilberto. This can make his music feel a touch formal at times, almost uncannily precise, but just as it does on 2017’s Tempo dos Mestres, that production style gives The Room a clarity that allows the listener to focus on how deftly both musicians move across the album. Like a World Cup telecast, even the slowest moments of these performances deserve to be seen in the highest possible definition.
Nascimento and Gendel’s rapport was obvious on the five Tempo dos Mestres songs they recorded together, and they bonded further over a shared love of Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell and the 1964 Stan Getz and João Gilberto smash Getz/Gilberto. While that album also brought together an American saxophonist and a Brazilian guitarist, it’s Gendel whose playing more closely recalls that of Gilberto. In a reedy tone that sounds nearly as much like a flute as it does a sax, he flies close to the ground, sometimes barely blowing above a whisper; when the end of “Foi Boto” calls for greater intensity, he gets it by playing quieter. Gendel can write a gorgeous, aching melody—that’s him at the tender core of Sam Wilkes’ “Run,” for one—but hearing him play it straight across an entire album is a very welcome reminder of the depth and delicacy that’s sometimes obscured by his effects.
Gendel’s sax tends to take center stage on these songs, but the intricacy of Nascimento’s writing and the sturdy confidence with which the guitarist plays makes listening to The Room feel a bit like seeing a solo performance at the Palais Garnier; losing yourself in the architecture is half the point. Like Baden Powell, Nascimento can turn the blank spots and heavy shadows of minimalism into florid, nearly Baroque curlicues with little more than a shift of emphasis. On “Kewere,” he pins a couple of bends to the end of his lines and fills in negative space with ringing harmonics in a way that recalls John Abercrombie, while the plucking and tapping of “Astral Flowers” could have been taken from a Meredith Monk score. For Nascimento to show this much range without being showy is a testament to how well The Room coheres.
In keeping with their tendencies as soloists, both players coil themselves around these songs, prioritizing rhythmic complexity and sheer prettiness over far-out exploration. It makes the music feel compact and concentrated, ripe with potential energy they both expend with great patience and never without the other nearby. At times, one will round a corner in their playing and start doubling the other’s line; at others, they work like partnered abstract painters, intuiting where to place their brush without having to look at the other’s work. In the gorgeous “Poeira,” they gather the melody up, then follow their own courses, their lines drifting apart and back together as they slowly descend like two feathers dropped from the same height. The sense of connection between Gendel and Nascimento is obvious, but it’s at moments like this, when they fall away from one another and still feel inseparable, that give The Room its intimate charm.
