INTIMATE STRANGERS
Sara Serpa – voice, composition, Emmanuel Iduma – text, spoken word, Sofía Rei, Aubrey Johnson – voice, Matt Mitchell -piano, Qasim Naqvi – modular synth
The New York Times – Best Jazz Album of 2021
#1 Os Melhores Álbums Nacionais de 2021 – Rimas e Batidas
Vocalist of 2021- El Intruso Critics Poll
Best Albums of 2021 – The Nation
Os Melhores do Ano 2021- Jazz.pt
“Essential as air, solid as earth, and cleansing as water, Serpa’s resonant musical world teems with beauty, grief, love, and humanity. Intimate Strangers is a towering achievement by an artist whose gifts seem to know no bounds.” Monarch Magazine
“Ms. Serpa’s thoughtfully arranged music explores sonic dualities: spoken and sung; acoustic and electronic; scored and improvised; sound and silence. Like Mr. Iduma’s texts, her music mesmerizes, simultaneously comforting and confronting its audience” Larry Blumenfeld, Wall Street Journal
” It resonates on a level that goes beyond admiration of the aesthetic of the art of itself, but rather one must marvel at how it penetrates the soul of the human being and calls upon us to reflect upon the world in which we live.” Jonathan Blackman, Occhi Magazine
“The ultimate vision belongs to Serpa, who’s among the most singular talents working in music today.” Michael Roberts, Jazziz Magazine
_______________
A collaboration between Portuguese vocalist-composer Sara Serpa and Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma, drawing inspiration from Iduma’s latest book, A Stranger’s Pose, a unique blend of travelogue, musings and poetry, with a foreword by Teju Cole. In a combination of music, text, image and field recordings collected by Iduma during his travels, Intimate Strangers explores such themes as of movement, home, grief, absence and desire in what Iduma calls “an atlas of a borderless world”.
Intimate Strangers, which premiered in 2018 as a John Zorn Commission at National Sawdust, is an interdisciplinary musical performance that portrays writer Emmanuel Iduma’s travels in several African countries.
Taking Nigeria as a point of departure, it describes several encounters the writer has along his journey from Lagos to Sarajevo along the coast. The journey takes unexpected turns, resulting in reflections on the sea, the desert as well as natural and artificial borders he is faced with. There is beauty in these encounters, even when they describe love and loss, grief and longing, displacement and war, privilege or apathy.
While Emmanuel represents himself, Sara Serpa along with the voices of Sofía Rei and Aubrey Johnson are simultaneously narrators, storytellers and spirits that travel along, opening several emotional doors through the piece. With music composed by Serpa, it features also Qasim Naqvi on modular synth and pianist Matt Mitchell.
Like echoes from a distant reality, Intimate Strangers aims to reflect on how we see the other and how we describe hospitality and humanity for future generations
All photos by Da Ping Luo.