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Jazz Articles about Nicola Conte
About Nicola Conte
Instrument: Multi-instrumentalist
Heartbeats Full of Soul
by Chris M. Slawecki
Nicola Conte & Spiritual Galaxy Let Your Light Shine On MPS 2018 One of the best parts of Let Your Light Shine On is how it plucks out musical threads from throughout the galaxy (more on that later) and knits them together into truly groovy, soulful cloth. But music is only one of many real good things this set has going on. Light is the first album by internationally-renown Italian ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Nicola Conte presents Cosmic Forest: The Spiritual Sounds of MPS
by Chris May
The description “spiritual jazz" means different things to different people. It was first applied to the predominantly African American style platformed by the Strata-East and Muse labels in the early and mid 1970s. The tag was not introduced until a decade later, and a better one would have been “cultural jazz," despite the tautology--for although every Strata-East and Muse artist would, if asked, almost certainly have acknowledged the inspiration of John Coltrane's masterpiece A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1964), little of ...
Continue ReadingNicola Conte: Let Your Light Shine On
by Chris May
Italian guitarist, bandleader, crate digger and DJ Nicola Conte's journeys into musics originating from beyond Europe—be they Brazilian, Hindustani, Latin American or African—sometimes carry a touch of the touristic about them, but his work is so transparently heartfelt that it never becomes a problem. It is also, always, superbly well crafted. Conte identifies Let Your Light Shine On as a celebration of African American spiritual jazz. It is perhaps his strongest release since his acid-jazz masterpiece, Jet Sounds (Schema), in ...
Continue ReadingNicola Conte: Free Souls
by Enrico Bettinello
Tutta l'anima di Nicola Conte. Inconfondibile. Mettiamo un po' in ordine gli elementi. La sua passione per la black music è vera e consapevole, ormai da anni: jazz, soul, latin, bossanova, funk, sono elementi di un vocabolario che ha le pagine un po' ingiallite come si conviene a chi si bagna nei più balsamici vapori lounge. La sua abilità come DJ, produttore, selezionatore è provata ormai da una discografia che sta diventando piuttosto corposa, fatta di ...
Continue ReadingNicola Conte: Rituals
by AAJ Italy Staff
Strano destino, quello di Nicola Conte, artista dalle notevoli potenzialità, grande conoscitore del jazz [e non solo] dei decenni passati, straordinario remixatore e compilatore, ma rimasto probabilmente prigioniero di una visione miope e troppo rassicurante di quello stesso jazz da cui trae il proprio linguaggio: a quattro anni di distanza dal precedente Other Directions, che già ci aveva suscitato molte perplessità, anche questo nuovo Rituals sembra volere riposare comodamente su una formula di easy-listening risaputa e priva di particolari guizzi. ...
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