Once again, I’m just here to add overtones to others’ resonances. In this case, it’s to add something to further describe Carioca guitarist Ulisses Rocha’s Casamata. It’s not lost to me that somehow when I’m writing about this release, we’re all sharing a bit of the same seasonal weather. In the Northern Hemisphere this part of fall is actually a capstone featuring all the greenery of summer and the briskness of cool fall. In the south you flip the script, and you end the same, albeit with a return to springtime. Once again, it’s the time of the year that music just like Ulisses’s sounds perfect for these “in between” seasons. Ambient, breezy, and “clean-sounding” it just goes down easy in a thoughtful way.
It’s for those above reasons, I urge you to scroll all the way down and visit the Discogs landing page for this release. There you’ll a review by one “rodrigobreak” who encapsulates perfectly, succinctly, why this Ulisses’s greatest work (an opinion I wholeheartedly agree with). To paraphrase him, this release marks the point when Ulisses crosses from the realm of jazz into the worlds of ambient and New Age music.
As correctly stated, Ulisses began his career in Rio De Janeiro playing with various jazz groups like D’Alma or musicians like César Camargo Mariano and as a session guitarist for singers like Olivia Byington and Gal Costa. By the time of 1989’s Casamata, Ulisses already had in the can a solo debut of instrumental Latin jazz featuring musicians such as André Geraissati and Teco Cardoso who were already crossing the line venturing further away into the lands of minimalism and experimental work.
The discogs review points out a salient turning point. When Ulisses united his love of music with other love (sailing) that’s when he encountered a different way to make music. While sailing across the Mediterranean, landing on Ithaca, Ulisses thought he saw a sign noticing the name of the Greecian hero “Ulysses” written on a tablet, there he felt deeply moved by myriad ways the sea can go from thrashing you violently to periods of utter calm, where it seemed things barely moved. Man somehow must find his place amongst the worldly atmosphere.
It was those memories of really tapping into his environment that remained vivid in his mind. Once he came back to Brazil, Ulisses felt compelled to treat his guitar and any instruments he’d use in his next record as more than just instruments. To treat these tools as brushes to paint such a picture.
From February to April, 1989, in the dead of summer, Ulisses decamped to Sao Paulo with keyboardists Dino Vicente, Eduardo Souza and Plínio Cutait, trying to introduce all sorts of newfound technology — samplers, synths, and sequencer — into his music, using it to add atmosphere that jived with his partially-improvised guitar compositions. Where his previous work was busy in an expected way, Casamara, this pillbox featured gorgeous minimal pieces that ebbed and floated. Seemingly, songs like “Cinza No Olhar” imparted a sonority that was a fusion of Brazil, of the Mediterranean, of new Europe, of eastern tantra, of new ideas that were universally forward-thinking in a way that easily slots into what one dubs “Balearic” now.
In interviews, Ulisses spoke of growing up, raised as most young guitarists under the influence of rock groups like Yes, Genesis, and others, only to discover the tasteful fusion of Jeff Beck, who’d turn him on to jazz and in turn to rekindle his love with Brazilian music. The jazz of his nation spurred him to evolve into a love for harmonic playing. Looking to further what other greats like Egberto Gismonti and Hermeto Pascoal explored, on Casamata, Ulisses luxuriates in the expanses of musical space. On the spectrum of Philip Glass and Tom Jobim — both artists he admires — songs like the title track and “Sem Direção” explore that magic Pat Metheny tapped on his sunny minimalism with the former (and with Lyle Mays, everywhere else).
So, to make a long story short, the deep romanticism and bittersweetness coursing through Casamata is not just a spur of the moment kind of thing. An album like this, as Ulisses would admit, is the result of process and progress. It’s effortless glide seems simple but if you study, really study its contours, as one can do to hypnotic tracks like “Luz De Vagalume” or “Segredo”, one sees you can’t really shortcut through to get to the good stuff. One really has to set their sights on doing the heavy work to get to see the easy stuff work itself out.
In the end, as we drift towards new moors, it seems we really always end up floating through, ending up in whatever season we were meant to land on.