Label: Obliquity Records, 2025

Personnel - Sara Serpa: voice; Matt Mitchell: piano.

Portuguese singer Sara Serpa and American pianist Matt Mitchell are inquisitive, creative artists unafraid to venture into challenging terrain. End of Something, their first duo recording, meditates on introspective themes with timbral fluidity and lyrical melodicism. The album features compositions by both artists, along with a thoughtful interpretation of Messiaen’s “Les Bergers”, the second movement from his La Nativité du Seigneur (1935).

Serpa’s “News Cycle” opens magnificently, immediately sparking curiosity as it evolves from insistent, grounding motifs into a reflective rubato passage shaped by abstracted piano reveries and simmering tension. “The Future”, first appearing on Serpa’s trio album Close Up (2018) and featuring Virginia Woolf’s somber quote (“the future is dark…”), is rendered with a delicate, Satie-like harmonic poignancy.

The album is far from celebratory, sustaining a pervasive sense of desolation across several pieces. Mitchell’s “Hyper-Pathos” crawls with melancholy and restrained gloom; “Diction” unfolds slowly and cautiously, Serpa’s voice weaving through its contemplative expanse; and Serpa’s “Carry You Like a River”, with text from a haiku by American poet Sonia Sanchez, stands out as a technically brilliant, plaintive lament. Its ebb and flow radiate mystic overtones through Mitchell’s attentive playing and Serpa’s assured, graceful delivery.

Sung in Portuguese and drawn from a poem by Sofia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Serpa’s “Ar e Vento” carries subtle folk undertones, while “Dead Spirits” assumes the form of a solemn chorale, setting a text by Belgian-born French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. The album concludes with Mitchell’s “Hypo-Bathos”, a spacious, brooding piece where incisive vocal gestures hover above sparse, lugubrious chordal variations.

The narratives unfold patiently—some imbued with vibrant color, others with a subdued austerity. The mood, more blue than bright, mirrors our uncertain times, balancing complexity with quiet resolution. Listeners must be open to its intimate, deeply contemplative world.

Favorite Tracks:
01 - News Cycle ► 04 - The Future ► 08 - Carry You Like a River

Label: Palmetto Records, 2022

Personnel - Fred Hersch: piano; Esperanza Spalding: vocals.

Without major arrangements, this piano-voice duo recording captured live at New York's Village Vanguard, shows off the many musical qualities of Fred Hersch and Esperanza Spalding. The pair imbues most of the tunes with a quirky perspective and humor, but I felt this work more as an audience entertainment rather than an audio recording to be revisited.

Gershwin’s “But Not For Me” swings in rubato time with theatrical posture and a kind of jocularity in the words. Spalding’s vocal solo is followed by Hersch's contrapuntal notes professed in different registers of the piano. The musicians waste no time showing melodic agility on “Dream of Monk”, a tune with lyrics from the pianist, which had been previously included on his 2012 trio album Alive at the Vanguard (with bassist John Hébert and drummer Eric McPherson). Due to its nature, there’s an ample improvisational window turned into playful and intuitive interaction. Monk’s mysterious ways are evoked and exhaled at every breath with fluid changes of rhythm and intonation.

The homage to the iconic pianist of “Round Midnight” is intensified with a rendition of one of his tunes: “Evidence”, here made wondrous in detail by Hersch after a responsive introduction. The vocalist shines on the latter piece but finds new spaces on “Loro”, where the Brazilian folk complexities of its composer, Egberto Gismonti, is dismantled by an effortless communication with her accompanist. Their deep-seated instinct takes the form of a slinky celebration on Charlie Parker’s calypso-bop flavored “Little Suede Shoes”, where there’s an inclination for percussive extended techniques and the low registers.

“Girl Talk” is made rightfully critical by Spalding but didn’t catch my ear, just like “A Wish”, the discreet closing number penned by Hersch and Norma Winstone and firstly recorded in 2003 to be included on their duo album Songs & Lullabies.

Mostly traditionally low-key, this is an album to be played once, not twice… and here comes Monk again!

Favorite Tracks:
02 - Dream of Monk ► 05 - Evidence ► 07 - Loro