Pedro Velasco
Pedro Velasco is London based but was born in Lisbon; his exquisite guitar music seems to emerge from the distant past of his childhood and beyond, the Brazilian music in which his household was immersed and which first inspired him to pick up a musical instrument, aged 12 years old – the samba, perhaps, or maybe even the melancholic strains of Fado.
“Divagar Devagar” is an album of honest and clean beauty, made of fragments of a history long gone. And in which the title deserves copying: to be listened to slowly.’ - jazz.pt
“Whatever you think of solo guitar, Pedro Velasco’s Divagar Devagar is a thing of meditative beauty that moves through brief but intense moods, gently yet vibrantly, and leaves the silence resounding with its gentle echoes.” - FREQ Magazine
Divagar Devagar features the intimate and immersive genre-fluid contemporary jazz by the celebrated guitarist Pedro Velasco. Divagar Devagar is the Portuguese guitarist’s debut solo album of his own material.
On this hauntingly brilliant and deeply personal album, Pedro Velasco steps out of time, into the fathomless realms of memory, divining and picking out shapes and compositions which speak of musics, hybrids as yet unborn.
The glimmering ebb and throb of Velasco’s guitars are occasionally reminiscent of the sound-world created by Jan Garbarek, whilst elsewhere there are other oblique reminders - of The Durutti Column, of Jimi Hendrix’s searing hot searchings, of Stockhausen’s Kontake, or the dark, slap-delay and solitary human blues of John Fahey’s, Red Cross.
Overwhelmingly, however, Divagar Devagar is a thing of limpid, insistent beauty, its melancholic melodies dropping like black petals into night waters. It enfolds and entrances; it takes you to places you will want to revisit time and again.
Divagar Devagar was released on 27th October 2023 on Clonmell Jazz Social, and is available on CD, and digital here.
“The minimal, melancholic guitar music of the Portuguese Pedro Velasco is food for the muser, for whom life is too fast and daylight too bright, for the sedate bookworm, for those who prefer to indulge in melodies that extend seemingly infinitely, for lovers of Loren Mazzacane Connors and Tom Carter, for those who like to doze off in the evening earlier than planned.” - Gonzo Circus