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INTERVIEW Fire, freedom and relentless invention

Jazz guitarist KARL EVANGELISTA talks to Chris Searle about the impetus behind his new album

OUTSTANDING free guitarist Karl Evangelista, of Filipino descent, was born in California in 1986.

His early inspirations were Hendrix, Cream and “the boundary-breaking music” of Coltrane, Ornette and Ayler which led him to “detect a conceptual overlap between the socially orientated improvisation of psychedelic guitar and the extended improvisation of free jazz.

His new album Apura! — from the Filipino word meaning “very urgent” and also the title of an epochal 1968 album by the South African Blue Notes — is full of fire, freedom and relentless invention.

For the album, Evangelista assembled pianist Alexander Hawkins and two hugely experienced octogenarians — pioneering Cape Town drummer of the Blue Notes, Louis Moholo-Moholo, and Yorkshire-born alto saxophonist of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Trevor Watts.

Evangelista first met Moholo-Moholo when he interviewed him for his graduate thesis on the Blue Notes. “His driving cause as a musician was to free South Africa from apartheid. His impassioned energy is informed by very personal, deeply human forces.”

Watts “has always spoken through his horns with precision, clarity and power, making sounds that are thoughtful, exhilarating and perfectly voiced,” while Hawkins, closer to his own age and duo partner of Moholo-Moholo, “is one of the most versatile and technically accomplished musicians of our generation. He can play absolutely anything with such intense focus and intelligence.”

The making of Apura! was “one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had,” he says. “Louis and Alex have such strong rapport that it wasn’t difficult for me to release my own statements inside that vitality.

“Louis and Trevor have a powerful history together from the 1970s, so the energy in the London studio seemed to step back decades with an air of inevitability about it, connecting present-day creativity with the activist free improvisation of the 1970s and 1980s.

“I found it impossible to ignore the debt my generation owes to musicians who both lived through and battled against the injustices of the last century,” he says. “By fostering an intergenerational dialogue, Apura! seeks to show ways in which 21st-century music-making can activate the sociopolitical thrust that helped to topple apartheid, racial segregation in the US and other past evils.”

Hawkins’s charging intro to FDT and Watts’s universal notes explore the world and its people and Moholo-Moholo’s ever-inventive drums seethe with liberation.

Two generations spanning two centuries are aflame throughout this double album, a miracle of sonic unity and resistance. Evangelista’s strident guitar is a cohering force in its musical heart, never dominant, always brotherly, pivotal and surging with the sound of concord.

It’s a record which is a summation of our times and a signal of hope to our future.

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