RODRIGO AMADO

THE BRIDGE

Further Beyond

Review

28

October, 2025

By: Khagan Aslanov

Photos: Laurien Godfroid

Review: Rodrigo Amado. The Bridge. Further Beyond (Trost Records, 2025). Rodrigo Amado, tenor saxophone/ Alexandre Von Schlippenbach, piano/ Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, double bass/ Gerry Hemingway, drums, voice.

Masterful Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado doesn’t make free music, but music that is free. His international collective The Bridge are back with their second effort and, as would be expected from fans of either of the maestros assembled, the pyrotechnics and solidarity showcased by the quartet are truly something to behold. Further Beyond feels like a continuous forceful exhale, and Amado’s peerless playing on the tenor presents a refracted image of tone, texture and harmony. Coiled and endlessly inventive, the pieces that make up the album always sound like they’re collapsing to fractal parts, before fusing back into a pulsing whole, then back, again and again.

There are aspects to these pieces that function as warped trilobites of jazz in the late 1950’s, just as it began leaving its established modalities, and subverting traditional binaries of structure and rhythm, while holding onto a scrap of its symphonic core. That indelible tension is felt throughout Further Beyond, in the atonal insurrections that are seamlessly grafted into otherwise-melodic passages of “A Change is Gonna Come”, in the ostinato variations that open the title piece, in the concentric lung-work that gives shuddering shapes to “That’s How Strong This Love Is”. Amado’s playing, both in its compositional and improvised modes, is a compressed display of jazz’ endless morphology – gritty, anarchic, spiritual, self-referential, virtuosic, equally tuneful and utterly untethered from any scaffold.

What Amado avoids in fine style is over-cluttering, which speaks all the more to his adeptness. No part of Further Beyond feels overly dense or needlessly obtuse. Even as its identifying masks keep falling to the floor, the album flows with ease and grace, and in the midst of Amado’s horn workouts, the musicians that make up The Bridge are all given room to stretch and show off:

Alex Von Shippenbach is in typically fine chameleonic form, layering profoundly lyrical tonality into a supremely angular style. He splices in a dizzying amount of combustibility into the record, full of spiky dissonance and motivic phrasing.

Bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten lets loose his diverse palette that has, over the years, spanned everything from funk to art rock. His propulsive playing forms the foundation of the record, by turns communing directly with the piano, the tenor sax, or falling back onto the drums, to form nervy percussive interplay.

Gerry Hemingway brings forth everything that had made him such a crucial piece of Anthony Braxton’s ensembles in the 80’s and 90’s – effortlessly shifting between being a grounding foil to the mutiny on display, and a willing participant in its most unhinged moments. His squalling, pitched vocal improvisations add another feral element to the middle passage of the title piece, as the instruments collide into a collective frenzied descent.

On Further Beyond, The Bridge sculpt their second masterpiece, a demonstration of skill and rapport, agile, thunderous and free, showing once again everything there is to love about improvisational music.