“My music is kind of intricate,” Marta Sanchez admitted. Then she quickly added, “It’s not that I’m not attracted towards intellectual music, but I’m attracted to beauty–in music and in art–but both at the same time.”
Listen to Sanchez’s bracing, elegant pianism as you can do Saturday at BOP STOP, and you’ll learn that intellectual rigor wrapped in beauty are magnetically attracted to her, too.
The Madrid-born pianist is on quite a roll lately. Her 2015 release Partenika (Fresh Sound New Talent) was named by New York Times’ jazz critic Ben Ratliff to his Top Ten recordings list for that year. It was the first of three releases, including the acclaimed SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum) (Whirlwind Recordings, 2022), to feature a two-saxophone frontline that is her main working unit. With Perpetual Void (Intakt Records, 2024), Sanchez returns to the trio format for the first time since a debut recording released on a small Spanish label 2008.
The music on Perpetual Void teems with lines of melody twining above and through layers of rhythm. There’s a lot going on under her two hands, yet for all it’s evident complexity, the music emerges with the dense clarity of a Bach fugue.
Unsurprisingly, the classically trained Sanchez played a lot of Bach in her conservatory days. Yet even without the potential for counterpoint presented by the horns, her approach shines through—literally. Every line, every voice emerges from the ensemble with lucidity and luminosity.
Let’s add duende, too. Titles on Perpetual Void, such as “Prelude to Grief” and “I Don’t Wanna Live the Wrong Life and Then Die” hint at darkness. And darkness, the death of her mother to which SAAM was a response, and the resultant insomnia, have tinted Sanchez’s recent experience.
Yet “Wrong Life” emerges from optimism. “I connect with that phrase because I think a lot about my life,” she said on a video call from a sunny room in her home. “I’m doing whatever I wanna do and . . . I’m not letting myself just go with whatever life gives me, but I’m deliberate about what I want my life to be.”
Lately that life has involved a series of concerts in California with a trio of bassist Tyrone Allen and drummer Eliza Salem, who will be on the stand with her at BOP STOP and at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Erie, Pennsylvania. “In a trio, everybody’s at the center of things,” she said. “That balance is way more calibrated than the quintet. The composition is also there, but we focus more on the play and interplay.”
A recording from her recent tour that is circulating on the Internet shows that interplay can erupt with explosive power when needed but is essentially athletic in a balletic way. Think of a rhythmic gymnast, which Sanchez was when she was a member of the Spain’s Union National Team.
The five apparatuses used for individual competition in rhythmic gymnastics are, rope, hoop, ball, clubs and ribbon. Metaphorically speaking, all are present in Sanchez’s musicianship in the form of tensile strength, geometrical perfection, coordination, power and looping, graceful line. And then there’s beauty. “I want my music to resonate with people that don’t necessarily know anything about music, but also, I don’t do on purpose like that, she said. “It’s just like the music that comes from within.”