*Announcing* Tomin - Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina /// debut album out August 2nd, 2024
*announcing* IARC0083
Tomin
Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina
LP/CD/Cassette/DD out August 2nd, 2024
Introducing Tomin — the NYC-raised multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and bioinformatician — who today announces Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina, his debut album for International Anthem. An evocative collection of jazz haikus, this album hears Tomin employ a range of clarinets, trumpets and sine waves to pay homage to his late grandmother, his older sister, and the jazz elders who have inspired him.
These 24 tender miniatures tell the story of a transformative period in Tomin’s life. Reflecting on love, change, and the passage of time, Tomin’s astute playing and expert arrangements bind the album together in an appreciation of the beauty of small acts.
((( Photos by Alejandro Ayala )))
"Angela’s Angel"
The album announcement is accompanied by the release of the lead single ‘Angela’s Angel’, a horn-led fanfare of gentle majesty, barely a minute long, but no less powerful as a result. Interpreting avant-garde master Granchan Moncur III’s tune of the same name, Tomin describes ‘Angela’s Angel’ as a “festive and dancing groove”, in tribute to his favorite trombonist and to the political philosopher and activist Angela Yvonne Davis, to whom the original was dedicated.
About The Artist
by Piotr Orlov
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.”
*Deluxe Vinyl Package*
Golden Hummingbird color vinyl
Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina comes on 140-gram vinyl (pressed by Pallas in Germany, with lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST) inside a heavyweight reverse board jacket, with our IARC obi strip and poly-lined dome patterned innersleeve.
We also have a limited edition color vinyl option, for the first pressing only, with 444 copies of *Golden Hummingbird* color vinyl available via our Bandcamp page.
Distribution via RedEye for US, Canada, North & South America
This album will also be available on CD, Cassette, and Classic Black Vinyl (same package specs as listed above).
Retailers in the United States or Canada or anywhere else inside of North, South and Central America... Please reach out to your sales rep at RedEye Worldwide if you are interested in making wholesale purchases of this album, or any other album in our catalog. Don't yet have a RedEye rep? Please just reach out to us and we'll get you hooked up!
Distribution via !K7 for Europe, UK, Australia, and ROW
This album will be distributed by our good friends at !K7 and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Australia, and everywhere else in the world outside of North & South America.
If you are a retailer or store with questions about wholesale or are just looking to get some of our records... we'd like to make things as easy for you as possible, please do not hesitate to reach out!!!
