Roy Brooks: Understanding

Roy Brooks: Understanding

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Understanding Reel to Real By Sergio Spada The impressive energy and vitality that shine through the notes of this recent publication could come to move listeners who love jazz and are looking for something special. The live recording of this concert, in Baltimore in 1970, in a special period of American and world history, full of instances, protests, claims, affirmations of identity, all themes that often passed (also) through music, invests like a tornado and gives no respite. It’s about a hundred minutes of pure instrumental force emanating from a quartet in a state of grace led by Roy Brooks, a drummer as full of experiences and gifted, although he is unknown compared to the big names. And the rest of the line-up needs no introduction: Woody Shaw on trumpet, Carlos Garnett on tenor, Harold Mabern on piano, Cecil McBee on drums. In a nutshell, one of the best live sets witnessed on support (CDs of excellent sound quality) in the history of jazz, probably without exaggeration. On the tireless, urgent, relentless rhythm, set by Brooks and the rest of the formation, a young Woody Shaw (no one in the formation passes thirty years) in combination with Garnett’s sax blow…

Pat Metheny: Side Eye Nyc

Pat Metheny: Side Eye Nyc

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Modern Recordings By Sergio Spada Pat Metheny Although about twenty Grammy Awards assigned to him can make you imagine that he has rested on his laurels and in spite of an age at which he could simply replicate his basic model to the delight of the faithful, Pat Metheny seems tirelessly (for him) and admirably (for those who listen to him) projected towards new episodes of his history and towards the exploration of what his guitar can still discover. Side eye NYC It proves it with projects that in recent years have all been of excellent level (“From this place” and “Road to the sun”) before this “Side Eye Nyc”, a very appreciable live recorded in New York with talented musicians and magnificently functional to the intentions of the leader: the eclectic, disruptive, modern drummer Marcus Gilmore and the imaginative and brilliant keyboardist James Francies. In the atmosphere of the live and working on original compositions and recoveries of materials from the immense archive that Pat can draw from his discography, the three interpenetrate in a very varied musical roundup and never waning in its yield (on average very high) often showing how three instruments can fill the space of…

Ferran Savall: Impro

Ferran Savall: Impro

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Ferran Savall By Alberto Bacci Ferran Savall is the son of Jordi Savall, a well-known Catalan musician, composer, and conductor.Savall’s family is a family of musicians: his mother (Montserrat Figueras) is a soprano, and his sister (Arianna Savall) sings and plays the harp.Ferran arrived at improvisation after a period in the shadow of his father, a rather cumbersome figure. From there he began an articulated path in search of a new and completely improvised language. Impro In “Impro” he invented a language that does not exist, almost as if it were a musical instrument, without the need to be understood with words and using sounds instead.Ferran has thus shown that he has what it takes to carve out his own precise space.He is a complete musician, with this unique characteristic of using the voice as an extension of his guitar, as a musical instrument.With “Impro” we are in the field of jazz but also beyond, in the sense that Savall plays wisely between melody and research, always with a sensitivity that does not deny the pleasure of listening, and does it in a very natural way.He does not limit himself to predictable jazz vocalizations but goes deeper by exploiting the…

EVE Audio SC207: good nearfield listening

EVE Audio SC207: good nearfield listening

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Current customs want you to spend less time in front of the HiFi system in the living room and more hours sitting at your desk than in the past. It is not said that in this case we must give up the quality of music reproduction: using good nearfield monitors (IE. close listening), we can continue to get excited with quality reproduction. This type of bookshelf comes directly from the pro sector and with the EVE Audio SC207 you can get extremely convincing results at a reasonable price. By Paolo Perilli “In my work as an editor of music reproduction equipment, I have always had a preference for low budget solutions that would allow to obtain satisfactory results based on the much sought after quality / price ratio. For my personal curiosity and for work reasons, for several years my attention has been captured by devices that do not belong to the HiFi world but to that of professional audio. This sector is dominated by mechanisms quite different from the Home one and my experience leads me to say that often and willingly the quality / price ratio of many equipment is superior and more generally really excellent as in…

Canio Lo Guercio: we are preparing for the best

Canio Lo Guercio: we are preparing for the best

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Canio LoguercioWe are preparing ourselves for the bestSqui(libri) Canio Lo Guerci is a unique figur, in the Italian singer-songwriter scene. It was already unique years ago, with its apartment concerts for a few lucky spectators. He is unrepeatable in his approach to singing, a painful, winking, ironic, disillusioned speech-sung. He has remained unique in his telling stories full of humanity, often of marginalized and different, emigrants of yesterday and today, saints and charlatans, freaks of our times lived in a hurry. To this frenzy he opposes a whispered song, intimate, apparently cautious and shy but in reality so incisive. And it does so by spontaneously mixing its native Lucanian culture with that of Neapolitan adoption, a dialect that is able to dissect to its beginnings in many of its songs, making it dark, raw and passionate at the same time. And he finds in this latest work a magical balance between what he has most dear to narrate. The story of our happy and desperate life (Who knows what it is), of these recent disoriented times (Keep my hands strong), his version of songs that he loves to reproduce with his taste (Incontro di Guccini), the most painful and profound…

Alessandro D’alessandro: Squi(libri)

Alessandro D’alessandro: Squi(libri)

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Alessandro D’AlessandroBy Sergio Spada SongsFor prepared accordion & electronics Squi(libri) Accordion, bandoneon, barrel-organ. Magical instruments, revealing of popular culture in different places, from Europe to South America. Instruments we associate with the idea of the square, the people, the earth, as well as some mythical images of the twentieth century by Bernardo Bertolucci. Great musicians have given glory to the accordion, and we are no less here in Italy, where there have always been excellent players. One of the youngest and best is Alessandro D’Alessandro, who, after collaborating with artists who are already great and curious explorers, finds with “Squi(libri)” the opportunity to create his own work, “Songs”, in which the instrument reigns beautifully with its sound (sometimes modernly elaborated or even partially overlapping), accompanied by singers and musicians guests of the album. Alessandro’s accordion, truly eclectic, inventive and passionate musician, offers the very successful readings of songs such as “Azzurro”, “Jamin-a”, “I giardini di marzo” or the beautiful “Nu hoppa haren kroka” by Daniele Sepe. While in other songs he finds the voices best suited to the nature of the song and the chosen text (Elio and Davide Riondino in the prologue, Sergio Cammariere in “Il manichino”, Petra Magoni…

The emotions of young Brendel

The emotions of young Brendel

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by Stefano Bevacqua Let’s say right away that the task was not the easiest: which author, which composition, which performer and, therefore, which record to baptize this column dedicated to classical music LPs? You could start with one of the great classics in an equally classical edition, such as Beethoven’s 9th or Verdi’s Requiem. Or an absolutely personal choice was made: Franz Schubert, a timeless giant (if he had not died at 32 he would have left us other immense jobs); the Impromptus, one of the most beautiful compositions of romanticism; Alfred Brendel, the pianist who perhaps more than any other has been able to read this author.And that he loved it so much to perform live and record this score several times. The most famous and most easily available, both in LP and CD format, dates back to the seventies for Philips (Impromptus D. 899 were recorded between 16 and 19 February 1972 while D. 935 was recorded between 4 and 8 June 1974): an adult reading, which some consider too analytical, perhaps excessively precise, which allows you to fully appreciate the stripping density instead of making you dream.The alternative, in the opinion of the writer, stronger, almost overwhelming,…

Heath Cullen

Heath Cullen

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Heath Cullen – Springtime in the heart The ways music makes are endless, like those of the Lord for those who have faith. And so it happens in a completely random way to hear about a distant Australian musician, to contact his European distributor who is in Scandinavia, to receive his record, to sit down to listen to it and to be struck at the heart. Because this songwriter suspended among so many flattering models of the past and his irrempent original personality, takes us by the hand and leads us on a musical and poetic literary journey at the same time quiet, powerful, sensitive, original, sincere, bare to the idea of absolute essentiality in the bright musical choices that accompany his singing. A voice, that of Heath Cullen, which seems to flow from the harsh nature of his land, and then a simple but extremely suggestive use of guitars, a rhythm that supports him, the addition of winds in songs in which the atmosphere turns on the rarefied. A handful of songs that seem to spring from each other, compositions by Cullen himself, minus two magnificent songs of others, one by the far-sighted Joe Henry (who produces the record,…

Wim Mertens

Wim Mertens

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Wim Mertens – Inescapable (1980-2020) 4CDs Music Wear. WMM 8020 – 542503435220140 years of creations, 61 compositions, 300 minutes of music (5 hours), 12 tracks never released before. 4 new compositions: European Grasses, for grand ensemble of 19 musicians; Novel, Wim Mertens plays the harmonium for the first time. Sprachresten, commissioned by the city of Bruges for the 500th anniversary of its famous Carillon; Under Erasure, for harps, played by Anneleen Lenaerts. 8 Wim Mertens hits revisited in live versions: Maximizing the Audience; The Belly; Lir; Watch !; Not at Home; Humility and Bassin d’Attraction; One Breath. {FD4} LIMITED EDITION.