Revisiting Evangelista’s Filipino Reflections

from the Bandcamp Web page for the recording being discussed

Following up on the Filipino reflections of Karl Evangelista’s Apura, which I experienced this past summer, I decided to pursue the composer’s suggestion to listen to an earlier album entitled Taglish, based on recording sessions in 2012. Like Apura this involved a performance by the Grex duo of Evangelista and Rei Scampavia joined by other musicians. These included saxophonist Francis Wong, who figured significantly in the Apura concert, playing both tenor and soprano saxophones on Taglish. The “front line” also included Cory Wright on baritone saxophone and Rob Ewing on trombone. Rhythm was provided by Jordan Glenn on drums and John-Carlos Perea on electric bass. Both Evangelista and Scampavia also contributed vocal performances.

The album title amounts to a “chromosomal crossover” of the “genes” for Tagalog and English, respectively. The recording consists of eleven tracks. (Only ten are listed on the Bandcamp Web page for this recording. The title for the eleventh, which is a guitar solo, can be found in the file name for the respective downloaded track.) With the exception of the track entitled “Ayler” (a reflection on the legacy of Albert Ayler lasting less than 40 seconds), each track identifies Evangelista’s familial connection. Thus, there are two tracks each for his wife (Scampavia), his mother, his father, and his older sister (manang).

To the extent that memory allows, I came away with a sense that the tracks on Taglish were more introspective and subdued than the movements I encountered during the performance of Apura. To be fair, however, I suspect that I was not the only listener whose attention was drawn to Andrew Cyrille’s drum work for Apura. In comparison, Glenn’s work was more subdued, even when he shared “composition responsibility” with both Evangelista and Scampavia for the “Ayler” movement.

I was also struck by the playfulness of the first movement “depicting” Scampavia, entitled simply “MRS” (Margaret Rei Scampavia). Her own keyboard work for that track is disarmingly simple, involving little more than brief patterns of repeated notes. (This is actually a trope picked up by other instrumentalists.) It is as if she had decided to “make room” for more adventurous solo improvisations by both Evangelista and Wong. Just as disarming was her duo singing with Evangelista, consisting entirely of open fourths. (That may have been open fifths; my musicianship training is now a part of my distant past!)

Scampavia’s keyboard work is far richer in her second movement, “Night Talk.” This amounts to an extended duo with Evangelista on guitar. The attentive listener should easily warm up to the intimacy of this conversation. While the entire album reflects Evangelista’s personal perspectives, “Night Talk” is decidedly the most moving and sensitive of all of the “portraits” depicted on this album. However, even in the absence of “personal knowledge,” one can readily grasp Evangelista’s skills at representing the diversity of character traits associated with his track titles.