Tomin | Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina




Flores para Verene (“Flowers for Verene”) brings together solo clarinet-and-trumpet versions of compositions by Tomin’s musical paragons — Mingus, Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Albert Ayler, Eddie Gale, among others. They were recorded to honour his life’s great hero, his maternal grandmother, Virlenice Diaz Valencia, who’d passed away in late 2019 in her native Colombia. (Tomin’s liner notes express the love the two had for one another with an exceptional clarity.) These versions are miniatures—short-length, layered constructions offering little more than the song’s theme, in lo-fi recordings that embrace the click of the clarinet keys—yet full-hearted in their intimacy. As with all the best sounds, laughter and tears are on equal footing here.


On the album’s Cantos para Caramina (“Songs for Caramina”) side, it’s Tomin’s own originals—dedicated to his older, very much living sister, Caramina—which rise to the fore. Horns are abandoned for the sine-waves of synths and electric keyboards. The longing of remembrance is replaced with the allure of a future yet to happen. The textured air is filled with melodic abstraction reminiscent of Erik Satie or Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, or maybe even Ra at his solo and sanguine. In 2021, as hope came into view, Tomin wanted to honour Caramina by creating something new. And this quartet of (equally) small-scaled compositions dance like a gathering of angels on the head of a pin. None too fancy, but eminently breathable. The kind of thing that insists, “There is more to this world.”



Cookie Consent with Real Cookie Banner