Months ago, Aragonese pianist and composer José Luis Ríos sent me a WhatsApp message. In the text, José Luis asked that I helped him pick a number of his compositions for piano to record as part of an album. The message also stated: “Considering my age, it’s for personal use.”

Born in Huesca in 1958, José Luis has had a significant career playing for summer orchestras as well as accompanying ensembles, choirs, and soloists. Additionally, much of his professional life has been dedicated to teaching piano performance, jazz, and popular music. Before I met him, I already knew of his background through friends and colleagues, so once he sent that message, I was certainly curious to know how his actual music would sound.

I clicked on the link he sent me, checked the files, and started listening to the tracks and reading the scores. I became immediately fascinated by his ideas and the way he develops material, as well as his influences—which also happen to be important to me. I heard Bach, but also Bill Evans. There you had some chords from Thelonious Monk, but immediately after something that could have been taken from Ravel. All of it filtered through the imagination of José Luis, a composer whose artistic interests are numerous and exist beyond music, in the realms of photography and literature.

Having listened to all the pieces he sent my way, I called him and strongly suggested that making an album for his own “personal use” would be absurd. Instead, I asked him if he would be interested in preparing a Protomaterial release together, as I believed his music deserved to have a larger audience. He agreed.

This is how Veranda came to exist. José Luis and I worked together selecting the specific pieces we wanted for this album. We built a collection that was representative of his diverse aesthetic interests, but could also be processed as a single entity and listened to from the beginning to the end. Furthermore, the nature of the music, which features notated parts often paired with improvised sections, led us to make a recording that has not many edits, so that the energy of the unique combination between more concrete and freer parts can be perceived.

Abstracto opens the album. It is a simple piece, in a similar fashion to how Bach’s Prelude in C Major of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier uses a basic thematic idea to present an evolving harmonic landscape. The difference here is that two contrasting worlds are introduced: the first is very mechanic, while the second provides a chordal, left-hand accompaniment to a jazzy melodic feel performed by the right hand.

As the title suggests, Algo divertido uses swift and cheerful materials that occasionally encounter moments that hint more serious and perhaps impending situations.

Círculos, the third track of the album, plays with motives that sound like reinterpretations of some of the pieces in Dave Brubeck’s famous 1959 album Time Out. It is in a rather odd ABA form, with a beautiful and romantic central part that shows José Luis’s very own lyricism.

Isabel is dedicated to the composer’s wife. It is a free, rhapsodic ballad, with an incredibly beautiful melody that keeps wandering among key changes and diverse harmonic fields.

Pienso en ti is somewhat of an extension of the previous track. However, here the romantic intensity is replaced by a sequence of chords that sound rather nostalgic. Additionally, a central section acquires a somber tone, which quickly is overtaken by the quality of the beginning again.

Ensayo is a very interesting piece, possibly one of the most original among the ones in the collection. It is made of three sections: a striking melodic motive played by both hands, a transitional area which features a D pedal, and a walking bass line with chordal accompaniment. It is as if the piece has been deconstructed, so that the solo happens earlier than it should, while the accompaniment of that solo is heard without any interference.

Torosantos is a character in the novel Discothèque, written by the late Félix Romeo. The piece is largely improvised and explores a free character, perhaps similar to the one of the Torosantos in the novel, who tours seedy music clubs across rural Spain. The main melodic material appears at the end of the piece, as an afterthought.

Verano is a maddening piece of music, which features a repetitive, sequential motive that seems to never end. It is perhaps a metaphor for summers in central Spain, which are long and extremely hot.

Algo indefinido is a fragmented work. Some of it is rather abstract, while sometimes popular forms such as shuffle rhythms are introduced. I think of it as a piece made of very tiny compositions.

The final piece of the album, Solo, is an impressionistic improvisation. It is a gorgeous example of José Luis’s sensibility and musical intelligence and acts as the perfect closure for the entire collection.

Overall, Veranda is a compilation of pieces that show José Luis Ríos’s ability to synthesize numerous approaches to making music into a coherent whole. It also is the debut album of a pianist and a composer whose own music should have been published much earlier, as its beauty and authenticity should be shared with those who seek sophistication, fine taste, and originality in our art form.

—Joan Arnau Pàmies, February 2024