Press December 2018

"Cuarteto Europa, a new reference for the continental Jazz."

"Their members don’t know it but their actions are already having a direct impact on the European Jazz scene."

"Justice is self-explanatory as the group brings together four of the most powerful and representative jazzmen of that feeling about jazz which many of us recognize, the European Jazz. Crossing chamber and folk languages with the American Jazz heritage, always through their own contemporary sensitivities."

SCHERZO – Pablo Sanz 

 

"Baldo Martínez... Who conducts most of his activities at home, and it’s a pity that almost everything must be solved within the Spanish walls, being a musician of extreme interest, as this beautiful last CD reconfirms."

 "In summary, two are the mayor winning elements of both group and album: the leader’s capability to write and organise and the timbral blend between violin and trombone."

 "The result, as we mentioned, is noteworthy."

MUSICA JAZZ-Alberto Bazzurro

(I T A L Y)

  

"Free expression music, in form and substance, paused and well-tempered, based on the instrumental balance that searches and reaches the beauty without provocation nor apparent effort but naturally, with Baldo Martínez steering the wheel from the back of the quartet, making Dominique Pifarély and Samuel Blaser’s interactions shine and placing Ramón López as the accurate metronome."

 

"Nine chapters of an audible book with no established beginning or end, where the listener designs his own outline to sort the chapters according to your personal taste or convenience."

TOMAJAZZ – Enrique Farelo

  

"-From free improvisation to chamber and folk European music- as from the speech, underlies the fundamentals of a relevant record, able to weave several plots in the same theme." 

"Before falling into diffusion, the album turns out exemplary in the gathering and expansion spaces, fixing, at the same time, one of the jazz peaks in the domestic season."

DIARIO DE JEREZ – Salvador Catalán

 

"The music proposed by the Galician double-bass player is not intended for consumption but to listen to it. Even if you can let yourself involved by these compositions and do as if you had nothing to do with it, at the end, they get you and you have to take sides. That’s why it’s art, because it compels you to participate."

 "Isla de piedra (Stone island)... It’s a long theme and halfway of it they can afford a beautiful passage in which the trombone stands out above and beyond his fellows. Afterwards, the double-bass dyes the Atlantic sunset with a solo that traps you without mercy."

 "And to finish Locura otoñal (Autumn madness), what a wonderful composition! Are they my fantasies or in this frenetic rythm there is a wink to Piazzolla’s Otoño porteño?"

BIRITMOS – Cándido Querol 

 

"Baldo Martínez is one of these musicians in the Spanish scene who has best succeeded in integrating the contemporary and the essences, not being kind neither tough with none of them, just leading the way. Meeting these three musicians facilitates the task –as intellectual projection first and as a creative one later– of materializing a desire of requirement and permanence on our own place in Europe."

 

"Martínez's writing makes possible finding a connection space for this absolutely timely and necessary union with the contemporary drive, the nostalgic view and the strength of the concepts."

 "The record is full of unique and collective findings, of openings walked one step at a time, metaphors of the Camino de Santiago, with its energy and its longing as a communication path in Europe, already global. They are polyphonies from the past and the present, with a chamber format that owes nothing to neither genres, not to a border nor an identity either."

 "There is an emphatic and wounded message in this brilliant and nonconformist music, far from traditional style parameters within jazz. There is construction, personality and identity. And real European inclusive culture."

 

"Sombra (Shadow) is a perfect piece to define each musicians’ form and the descriptive space. It clarifies Pifarély's sharp and hurtful lyricism, Blaser’s forcefulness and presence between substance and gas that disperse, López’s disorganised, latent and uncomfortable rhythm, Martínez’s rocky reinforcement of the ideas that provide encouragement."