Y’Y – Amaro Freitas

In Y’Y, Amaro Freitas takes the piano into a territory where playing also means listening to what existed before the instrument itself. A stay in Manaus and his exchange with the Indigenous Sateré Mawé community transformed his relationship with the Amazon into music in which water, forest, memory, and ancestry cease to function as external references and begin to determine the very shape of the compositions. Y’Y, a word meaning water or river in the Sateré Mawé language, thus continues the search that ran through Sankofa: moving forward also means recovering what coloniality sought to separate.

“Mapinguari (Encantado da Mata)” introduces this world through matter itself. Freitas turns the piano into a percussion instrument while the thunder drum summons the presence of the enchanted being that gives the piece its name. In “Uiara (Encantada da Água) – Vida e cura,” muted strings fragment the sound until part of the piano’s traditional identity begins to disappear. The point is not to imitate the forest, but to alter the instrument in search of another way of relating to it.

Water finds its most direct expression in “Y’Y.” Opposite Shabaka Hutchings’ flute, Freitas constructs two opposing movements that evoke the meeting of currents: the piano’s low notes move beneath a flute in which breath and sound become a single voice.

The second half expands this principle of encounter. Brandee Younger surrounds the piano with harp on “Gloriosa,” dedicated by Freitas to his mother, Rosilda; on “Encantados,” Hamid Drake, Shabaka Hutchings, and Aniel Someillan connect percussion, flute, and bass through music that understands African tradition not as memory, but as presence. The album ends by bringing different geographies together without forcing them to speak the same language.

Y’Y shifts the idea of roots: for Amaro Freitas, returning does not mean going backward. It means finding what can still teach us where to go next.