Jazz moderne

Pedro Molina is a Spanish double bassist based in Porto, Portugal for more than 8 years. A Name I Knew is his second album as a bandleader, a formidable step forward, an ascent involving enormous risk and which allows him to touch the brightest stars.

This quartet project (guitar, piano, double bass and drums) brings together excellent Portuguese musicians and explores an original repertoire rooted in jazz, ranging from pop/rock influences to free improvisation.

The four musicians are Hugo Ferreira on guitar, Miguel Meirinhos on piano, Pedro Molina on double bass as well as Gonçalo Ribeiro on drums.

All the tracks are composed by Pedro Molina and demonstrate an astonishing creative power which is then wonderfully enriched by the magic of improvisation carried out with his quartet.

A Name I Knew is an ambitious modern jazz album that combines dazzling energy, sensitivity, moments of restraint and mastered improvisations. The disc is distinguished by the complexity of its architecture and its superb quality constantly blurs the boundary between written composition and spontaneous creation. For example, on the first track, Denial, it is as if sound fragments test the air whilst the music is still unsure about its own shape. The results from the complicity between the four musicians resembles less a series of compositions than a living concept in perpetual movement.

There are records that demand attention even before the first notes of the first title have faded to make way for others, requiring concentrated listening from the listener, because each musical phrase, each intervention, each inflection, becomes significant, major. Pedro belongs to this category of composers whose work calls for both patience and attentive listening.

Between Denial (the first track) and Who Helps Me When I Can’t Remember Anything? (the last of the 8 tracks), nothing seems to arrive completely completed. Themes emerge, fracture, then return, transformed. One of the most fascinating aspects of this record is the way it resists (or refuses) the usual boundary between composition and improvisation. This border is not so much blurred as constantly renegotiated. Double bassist Pedro Molina, drummer Gonçalo Ribeiro, Hugo Ferreira on guitar and Miguel Meirinhos on piano play with a freedom and precision that never stay still. Their playing suggests heightened attention, as if each contribution of each member of the quartet was born from collective listening rather than from an individual affirmation. Here and there we find sensations similar to listening to certain titles by GONG or Soft Machine, this grain of creative madness which forever marks the composer’s and the musicians’ talent.

In Familiar as Fog and Vai Ficar Tudo Bem we feel a permanent creative urgency. As if the four musicians felt the need to enrich and illuminate the compositions because they still contain unexplored emotional and musical possibilities.

By listening to A Name I Knew we go through superimposed layers of curiosity, tension, clarity and rupture. What remains is not melody in the classical sense, but a persistent sensation of perpetual motion, as if the music refuses to settle long enough to be named, labelled, catalogued. There is pleasure in this resistance, but also a slight test. The listener is never completely outside the music, he is always drawn to be inside. That’s why this project deserves real respect for its ambition.

With his compositions for A Name I Knew Pedro Molina succeeds precisely because he understands one essential thing: the history of jazz was never meant to stand still.

One more word to salute the superb cover of this album whose design is of a modernity which corresponds perfectly to the creative genius of Pedro and the sublime degree of improvisation offered by the four musicians. Congratulations to Maria Mónica!

Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE

PARIS-MOVE, June 4th, 2026

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To buy the album

Tracklisting:

1. Denial 06:04
2. Acceptance 05:56
3. I’m Not the Same 07:39
4. Será Que Não Há Mesmo? 03:31
5. Valadas 05:54
6. Familiar as Fog 05:58
7. Vai Ficar Tudo Bem 06:44
8. Who Helps Me When I Can’t Remember Anything 06:00