By Peter Margasak – read more here.

It took moving to the US for singer Sara Serpa to fully grapple with the colonialist legacy of her native Portugal — a topic rarely discussed back at home — even though her family was directly involved in its waning days. Her parents were born in Angola, where they saw the mistreatment of the native population, an injustice they protested after moving to Lisbon.

Her stunning multi-media project Recognition confronts that dark heritage. Working with director Bruno Soares, she created a silent video from her grandfather’s home movies of Angola and Lisbon, interleaved with quotations from African anti-colonialist Amílcar Cabral, and the dazzling chamber jazz heard on this recording serves as its soundtrack.

On most of the pieces she lets the images do the heavy lifting, complementing them with wordless vocals marked by a characteristic precision and purity free of vibrato and empty ornamentation. Her superb collaborators —saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist David Virelles, and harpist Zeena Parkins — interact in shifting combinations, through composed and improvised material.

While the timbre often feels weightless, there’s a ruminative atmosphere to these gauzy vignettes, as charged unison lines and prickly counterpoint float more often than they resolve. Three pieces feature settings of riveting texts by Cabral, scholar Linda Heywood and fiction writer José Luandino that highlight the atrocities and resistance.