Oriol Roca Trio
ORIOL ROCA TRIO
Oriol Roca Trio & Lynn Cassiers
New album! Click here for more info
The Barcelona percussionist Oriol Roca has performed alongside some of the best improvisers and composers of creative music in Spain, as well as collaborating with figures like the Italian Paolo Angeli and Norwegian Jan Bang. But this is the first time Roca leads and writes music for his own band. He is accompanied by two old comrades, the pianist Giovanni di Domenico and the double bass player Manolo Cabras, two Italian musicians based in Brussels.
The natural communication between them – built after more than fifteen years playing together – is the perfect canvas for Roca’s music, that demands subtlety and a strong musical personality. The pianist Giovanni Di Domenico (Nate Wooley, Arve Henriksen, Jim O’Rourke) and double bassist Manolo Cabras (Charles Gayle, Erik Vermeulen, Enrico Rava) are two of the most personal voices on the European jazz and improvisation scene. Together they form a trio built on complicity, risk and friendship.
Oriol Roca is now débuting as leader and composer with a record of high emotional intensity, sometimes serene and at others volcanic, where north is always the melody. The debut album Mar is released by Belgian label el NEGOCITO Records, a Ghent based label focused on alternative and improvised music.
GIOVANNI DI DOMENICO: piano
MANOLO CABRAS: double bass
ORIOL ROCA: drums
MAR Best Jazz Album 2018 Award – XX Premis de la Música Catalana / Enderrock
“Oriol Roca is an excellent drummer who offers us a sober and deep album which opens an infinity of doors for the future of this trio, which we will follow with interest.” Improjazz (FR)
“Oriol Roca is a drummer with a simmering sensitivity that does not lack muscle. His playing has continued to send us back to one of the greatest percussionists known to free music, the huge Barry Altschul, whose Oriol appears today as the obvious successor.” Focus Vif (BE)
“A slow, placid and involving work, which requires careful listening.” Tomajazz (Spain)
“Oriol Roca is one of those drummers who demonstrate to us, by this great sensitivity that characterizes him both as a musician and as a composer, that the art of percussion consists in emphasizing the impulse of a music. ‘Mar’ is an album bursting with ephemeral pleasures, a music that takes the time to be concise, to get to the point and say things once.” Citizen Jazz (FR)
“It’s an uneasy serenity Oriol Roca settles into on his new recording Mar. All of the ingredients necessary for a strong dose of tranquility are present: melodic fragments suggestive of possible endings, the murmur of percussion like slow, easy breaths while dreaming, and highly-charged, vivid imagery. But the drummer, along with his trio of pianist Giovanni Di Domenico and double bassist Manolo Cabras achieve a tone that is subtly ominous and reveals a strange beauty.” Dave Sumner, Bird is the worm (USA)
“The magnetizing and extremely minimalistic playing leads to an almost mystical listening experience where every feeling of time and space disappears. A surprising listening trip” Georges Tonla Briquet, Jazz’Halo (Belgium)
“Oriol Roca bounces from one rhythmic to the next, coloring more than hitting, draws air movements more than he structures.” Diane Gastellu, Citizenjazz (FR)
“First album as leader of the drummer Oriol Roca. With the double bass of Manolo Cabras and the pianist Giovanni di Domenico, both old comrades of the Barcelona musician, they build a dense, yet diverse, and spacious sound space; just like watching the open sea in full navigation.” Enderrock Magazine (ESP)
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