The One That’s Hard to Place
Rão Kyão is a Portuguese flautist whose music sits at a crossroads that doesn’t appear on most maps. Malpertuis is the kind of record that feels like it was made outside of genre — not because it ignores tradition, but because it draws from too many at once to belong to any single one.
The African dimension is not decoration. Post-1974 Portugal was living with the reality of decolonisation — musicians, rhythms, and entire traditions from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and Guinea-Bissau were in close contact with the Lisbon scene. Rão Kyão absorbed this deeply. What you hear isn’t African music influenced by jazz, or Portuguese jazz with African flavour — it’s something genuinely in-between, neither borrowing from the other in the polite sense but genuinely fused.
The Bamboo Flute
The instrument is everything here. The bamboo flute carries a tonal quality that doesn’t translate cleanly to Western or African categories — it sits somewhere between the earthy resonance of sub-Saharan woodwinds and the lyrical fluidity of European jazz flute. Rão Kyão plays it with precision and expressiveness in equal measure. There are moments where the flute does something the saxophone simply cannot: it breathes differently, pauses differently, leaves different kinds of silence.
Why It’s Rare
This kind of record was always going to be rare — made in a specific historical moment (the creative ferment of post-revolutionary Portugal), drawing on connections that were unique to that time and place. The Lusophone world doesn’t have many documents like this, where African polyrhythm and Portuguese jazz conversation happen on entirely equal terms. It’s worth finding.
1976 is only two years after the Carnation Revolution. The post-April 25th creative opening was immediate — censorship lifted, African musicians arriving, borders of all kinds dissolving — and Rão Kyão was right in the middle of it from the very start. Malpertuis is not just a rare record; it’s an early document of that rupture.
Listen carefully to: the relationship between the flute lines and the percussion — that’s where the whole album lives.