Nov 19, 2024 12:57 PM
In Memoriam: Roy Haynes, 1925–2024
Powerhouse jazz drummer and bandleader Roy Haynes died Tuesday in Nassau County, New York. He was 99. One of the few…
“It was so mysterious and intriguing,” Ian Faquini says of the music of Guinga. From left, Natalie Cressman, Faquini and Guinga.
(Photo: Eric Crawford)In the past five years, composers Natalie Cressman and Ian Faquini have issued multiple duo releases, unveiling a sound that centers on intimacy, bell-tone resonance and unexpected harmonic movement. Informed by a variety of Brazilian traditions, including bossa nova and baião, their music transmits subtleties of joy and longing. But years before they began playing together — Cressman on trombone and vocals, Faquini on guitar — separately and at different moments, they shared an experience that would bond their artistry and alter their lives.
With the release of Guinga (GroundUP), Cressman and Faquini pay homage to its namesake, recording alongside the legendary Brazilian guitarist and composer who has inspired the development of their expression over many years, and whose sound, when first they heard it, changed the course of their careers. “From the first few chords, it just changed my life,” says Faquini.
“The melodies are so beautiful and singable,” adds Cressman, “but the more you try and sing it the more you realize how complex it is without trying to be cerebral. Everything he does is very felt from this inner source.”
A serendipitous series of events led to the artists booking a studio date with Guinga — beginning years earlier among the redwoods of Northern California. During sessions at Brazil Camp, where the duo met, they each heard Guinga perform live for the first time. “It was so mysterious and intriguing,” says Faquini, who’s served the camp as an instructor for 15 years. “That first week [hearing it] I was already dreaming about it.” Inspired by Guinga’s energy, and the rich, delicate harmonies of his songs, Faquini, a native of Brazil, who had grown up “a rocker,” shifted his focus. By the end of that week, he was helping Guinga demonstrate a complex song to the other students. “It wasn’t that I was that great of a guitar player,” he says. “It just got me in such a way that was natural for me.”
For Cressman, the moment served as both a turning point and an affirmation. Back then, she’d been feeling a bit ungrounded, unsure of which direction she should take her music. Then, all at once, she knew: “I heard him play and thought, ‘Wow, this is so beautiful and so unique and so intensely different’ from the music I was playing and listening to.” That reaction quickly bonded with Guinga’s acceptance of what Cressman describes as the “gentle, more emotive side” of her expression, a side for which she’d spent her early career trying to compensate. “For the projects I was playing with, that I played softer felt like a bad thing,” she says. “I was trying to have this persona of being louder and have this more testosterone-driven, high-octane music. And [Guinga] made me feel like it was OK to dig in to what was really most natural to me, which is this other side of the trombone that doesn’t get explored a lot.”
Before calling Guinga for the session, Cressman and Faquini nurtured the idea of recording with their mentor for some time. In spring 2023, they began contemplating their next duo project. They’d been working on some original material, but nothing close to a finished album. “I was like, ‘Well, we’ve been talking about recording Guinga’s music for a long time,’” says Cressman, “‘and he’s going to be here this summer.’” Originally intending to record some of the project in Brazil, Cressman and Faquini found Guinga’s busy tour schedule prohibitive. Instead, they found a studio a half-hour drive from Brazil camp that had an opening the first two days after Guinga completed his teaching term. “It literally couldn’t have worked out any better,” says Cressman.
The two spent that summer practicing repertoire together, choosing songs and working through arrangements. “During Brazil Camp, Ian would meet up with Guinga and sing through and work out the stuff that he was going to participate on,” says Cressman. They recorded the album in less than three days. “We made a lot of decisions just by playing and seeing what felt right, adding a song or a section,” says Faquini. “It was very natural.” One of the more poignant moments on the record was entirely unplanned. “It was kind of early in the day when we recorded ‘Segredo de Dadá’ and Guinga was like, ‘No, those notes are too high for me. Natalie, come sing these phrases.’ And it ended up becoming a duet just out of what made sense in the moment.”
But for all the moments of alignment, the artists experienced moments of anguish as well. Their first day in the studio was the day Cressman and Faquini’s dear friend and fellow artist James Casey died. “That was a surprising curveball,” says Cressman. “We were all thinking about James, and I was definitely crying between takes. But it was easier than I thought to convert the emotion that I was feeling and focus on the music. We were still able to have moments of joy recording, even with that hanging over us. But I was able to move forward putting the sadness into my intentions.”
With nerves already fraying, logistics took a hit when Faquini tested positive for COVID on day two. “Luckily, the studio was really nice,” he says. “Either I would stand outside in the trees and listen in my headphones, or I would stay in my isolation booth, but I wasn’t able to come into the control booth the whole time.”
Somehow, the artists willed the roadblocks to fall away and their grief to guide them through the music. They leaned into doleful melodies, arpeggiating shapes and syncopated lyrics — and focused on their mentor’s presence in the studio. “There’s a word in Portuguese that they say is untranslatable, but the closest thing would be ‘longing,’” says Faquini, “and it’s a word we use all the time called saudade. That sentiment is in most of the great sentimental Brazilian music and art, and definitely in Guinga’s music.” DB
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