Articles by Alex Franquelli
The Blues Against Youth: Apprentice
by Alex Franquelli
Somewhere, in a hushed place between Vicksburg and Yazoo City, an old riverboat must be chugging under the sun, clumsily pushing its cargo on the cloudy waters of that forgotten river, leading memories firmly astray. The old, Mighty Mississippi is just a few miles down, its stream running parallel to its tired cousin's lazy stroll, its gurgling refrain the longest theme ever heard by the old people chomping tobacco at this time of the day. “A river is a river," ...
Continue ReadingAmeen Saleem: The Groove Lab
by Alex Franquelli
Composer Irving Berlin once famously said that “everybody ought to have a Lower East Side in their life." True and, although technically speaking Brooklyn is not part of the octagon that thrives between Houston Street and FRD Drive, the groove, that precious intimate rumble of inspiration, is the one element that connects one area with the other; contemporary music and its multiple historical declinations. While the paradigm differs and keeps on evolving, the end result is invariably of a similar ...
Continue ReadingFunk Off: Things Change
by Alex Franquelli
The whole point, when it comes to marching bands, is that they have to well, stroll around while playing their instruments. I guess, you guess, that the whole point is lost on CD, where the mono-dimensional (time) facet of the spectrum monopolises the dynamics of the whole. Things Change makes obviously no exception, but does it matter? Not at all. The range of influences at play here is-- by itself--praiseworthy and laudable; the magnitude of their individual skillsets reveals a ...
Continue ReadingJaga Jazzist: Starfire
by Alex Franquelli
First things first: let's leave the definition of Jaga Jazzist music for last. Or, better, let's not even consider using labels. Let's not rush to conclusions, let's not fall in the sweet traps of music criticism where one plunges in forced by adjectives, hyperboles, comparisons, clever rhetoric and assorted namedropping. First things first, we said, as if it were easy to define an ensemble which has rewritten the history of European contemporary jazz by adding progressive, noise, classical and electronic ...
Continue ReadingFrancesco Nastro Trio: Colors of Light
by Alex Franquelli
As soon as one lets Francesco Nastro's fingers fondle those keys the way he does on “E all'Improvviso il Sole," the musical geometries that create Colors of Light finally come to life. The music springs from a cocoon-like environment in which pianists the likes of Bill Evans and Brad Mehldau must have forgotten their instruments around, which are by now subject to Nastro's gentle manners. It is jazz alright but, even more importantly, this is a study in melody; an ...
Continue ReadingThe Remote Viewers: Pitfall
by Alex Franquelli
I love a bit of Remote Viewers in the evening. If it's not in the scarcely busy second to last northbound Victoria Line carriage, I follow their urban drifts while strolling, hands in my pockets, on a straight line: the shortest trajectory from A to home. The things you see while listening to this London-based septet are the stuff you wouldn't notice otherwise. Pitfall closes a circle, one that started back in 2012 when the marvellous City of Nets came ...
Continue ReadingThe Necks at Cafe Oto
by Alex Franquelli
The Necks Cafe Oto London October 8, 2014 It is always a good sign when the imposing windows of Cafe Oto are misted up. If one could see through the condensation, if one could, with just one finger, remove the minuscule droplets amassed on the vertical plains, one would almost invariably spot fine music in the making. A woman, glass of red wine in hand, explains to her neighbour that, yes, this ...
Continue ReadingThe Remote Viewers: Crimeways
by Alex Franquelli
There is an almost indiscernible, cynical element in The Remote Viewers' music. It is probably hidden between the folds of its noir aesthetics, where contemporary fables of cops and thugs, the fuzz and hoodlums, seem to flourish in the dark corners of complex rhythmic patterns and atonalism. Or it is maybe the juxtaposition between the nocturnal, austere strut of the conversations entertained by the saxophones and the rare but effective interludes in a major key. Whatever it is, it works. ...
Continue ReadingEinar Scheving: Land Mins Fodur
by Alex Franquelli
It is jazz, all right. But it is that kind of jazz that manages to flow in a natural, effortless way. The rigid canons of composition are refined by a clever approach to folk music, which in Land Míns Föður (The Land of My Father) ceases to be a mere echo in an otherwise contemporary context to become the lens through which relatively recent influences are filtered and acknowledged. Drummer Einar Scheving is one of the most prolific and praised ...
Continue ReadingFabrizio Sferra Quartet: Untitled #28
by Alex Franquelli
It sounds great. It really does. It happens every time a record flows in such a way that it's possible to actually enjoy its variations, contrasts and colors. Yes, colors; Untitled #28 is full of them.Musically, for instance; the sound shaped by drummer Fabrizio Sferra's quartet is one which toys with perceptions of intensity and timbres in a way that appears to be utterly spontaneous, rather than planned. Sferra is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in Italian ...
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