Tomin - Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina

27-year-old Tomin Perea-Chamblee is a brass- and reed-centered multi-instrumentalist, the composer and arranger of pieces with excellently thorny harmonies, an at-times reluctant musicker and enthusiastic Brooklynite (born and raised, so his admiration primarily concerns the borough’s pre-gentralification qualities), who, by day works as a bioinformatician. If you're in New York, there’s an OK chance that you’ve heard him play before, with young (jazz-adjacent) bands and musicians of some renown. Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina introduces Tomin as an individual artist to the wider public, and is in many ways a tribute to family and heritage. It’s music grounded in clear purpose and a gravity seemingly beyond his youthfulness, yet coloured with unexpected hues, engaging a newness and hope that lies beyond tradition’s solemnity.

Tomin has been self-releasing the music compiled on Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina since 2020. Originally, these pieces were low-key exercises in personal expression, mini markers of intentional beauty. They were also a kind of culmination. By the time Tomin got around to recording them, he’d already been a high-school trombonist in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Youth Orchestra, and a many-hats-wearing horn player with Standing on the Corner, while studying at Columbia. Setting these sounds down on tape was just a matter of time and follow-through.

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.”

- Piotr Orlov