Norberto Lobo, João Lobo - Oba Loba (2014)

“Mogul de Jade”, the CD which joined the two Lobos for the first time – Lobo Norberto and Lobo João –, with a music that puzzled the label maniacs, couldn’t be an isolated act. The guitarist and the drummer are back with an album promising to be even more problematic, for store owners and record colectors, in what concerns the task to put it on the shelves. There’s more than one way to listen to “Oba Loba”: as a folk work going beyond the codes of this music idiom, “weird folk” included, or as a jazz opus contaminated by other expressions, more than what usually happens in the “creative jazz” segment.

The music here is hybrid, ambiguous, ambivalent, interstitial and a big surprise for all those who could think that the presences, as sidemen, of Giovanni Di Domenico, Jordi Grognard, Niels van Heertum, Lynn Cassiers, Ananta Roosens, Daniele Martini and Gregoire Tirtiaux are evidences that there´s some jazz, or some free improvised music, going on. Well, it’s not true. Jazz is there, alright, as are multiple folk elements, but there’s much more to ear. It’s impossible to identify every factor, every influence, every reference we can find minute by minute, and that’s good. In this fantastic edition, everything is in a process of osmosis, with the cells uniting instead of dividing themselves.