Karl Evangelista's Ampura

***Bay area guitarist's latest featuring percussion legend Andrew Cyrille, Francis Wong, Lisa Mezzacappa & more. "In the Filipino language Tagalog, Ngayon translates to “now.” Appropriately, this sophomore effort from Karl Evangelista’s Apura is intended to capture the feeling of an abstract and transcendent present - a moment apart from the desperation and uncertainty that afflicted the past several years of human life. What began as an indictment of fascism vis-à-vis Apartheid South Africa, Trump’s America, and the long lineage of Filipino political corruption slowly morphed into a story about how battling human violence requires endurance above all else. This recording came within a razor’s edge of total oblivion. Conceived in 2019, the original intention behind Ngayon was to provide an opportunity for the great Louis Moholo-Moholo to visit California for the first time in over three decades. Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and a variety of other unpredictabilities, Ngayon was canceled, re-envisioned, and rescheduled countless times. I take some pride but no great pleasure in declaring that only brutal perseverance, dumb luck, and the generosity of others rescued this project from the colossal hole that it dug itself into"