Claudio Sanna: Compositori Sardi Contemporanei II

Today's wine tasting is once again hosted by sommelier Claudio Sanna. He presents more local Sardinian varieties with a round of flights, much like the 2022 release Compositori Sardi Contemporanei. Instead of grape cultivars and vintners, Sanna presents multiple composers and performers for you to sample, not with your tongue but your ears. Just like a wine tasting experience, these tracks are a sample of the rich and fertile Sardinian landscape of creative musicians.

Double bassist Adriano Orrù's "Cosmogonia Semplice" ("Simple Cosmogony") is a blend of varieties that include jazz, chamber music, and free improvisation. His approach to the double bass has hints of fellow Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio and American percussionist Z'EV. His bass, like Sandro Mungianu's piano heard on "la plurima ombra del senso" is prepared with objects and electric spheres. Both musicians create a deep resonance that blooms outward as each fine tune their energy systems.

Gaia Aloisi's composition "Charmolypi" deals with the micro environments of the soul. For our enology purposes, the modulations of light, humidity, wind, and all the elements that influence wine on a microscopic scale are drawn out through the stillness and movement of piano notes.

Alessio Carrus presents "Eos-Phobos" for piano upon first inspection is colored by a fearful trepidation. Carrus tailors his notes with a portent of darkness, the same blackness which accompanies the dead of night. Eos, or the goddess of dawn, in Greek literature rose each morning from at the edge of the river Oceanus to deliver light and end the night's darkness, cannot extinguish the fundamental anxiety which pervades our modern world. On the tongue the music is full of tannin or structured by apprehension and unease. Elia Perinu and Mario Carta's compositions are inspired by the sea. Perinu utilizes a line taken from Arthur Rimbaud's poem "L'éternité," exploring the notion of eternity as juxtaposed with the impermanence of a singular moment. Here he draws upon the brief period when the sun, rising from the sea, is both part of and separate from the transforming waters. Carta's "quell'estate il mare più silenzioso" identifies patterns in an ever changing sea and ultimately settles upon the deafening silence of its vastness. Both artists describe a constant wave upon wave, which challenges the mind to organize the movements, but like the sea, this is an impossible task.

Gabriele Verdinelli, Roberto Piana, and Graziano Solinas harvest sounds from old vines to compose their music. Verdinelli's "Nodas 14, for piano and live electronics" draws inspiration from an ancient religious procession in Northern Sardinia with otherworldly vocals. Piana's "Petite Suite" and Solinas' "Luci e Ombre" take cuttings from 19th and 20th century France, grafting its rootstocks. Piana explores the flavors of a Baroque harpsichord performed on a modern piano. Solinas' tender sounds could easily be the soundtrack to a time-lapse film of the vines tiny buds emerging in spring through their leaf fall after harvest. Silvia Corda's four one minute long compositions for toy piano are like a mirto spritz—prosecco plus mirto liqueur, soda, and a orange slice. Like the centuries—old Sardinian drink, the brief tracks are quite refreshing and surely reminiscent of Thelonious Monk's 1957 rendition of "Pannonica" played on a celeste piano. The same freshness is evident in Battista Giordano's dancing "Bethel," it's nose tickling effervescent energy bubbling throughout this well ordered performance.

Also inspired by movement is Gabriele Manca's "Danza." The brief gamboling performance is both playful and rhythmically challenging. The music evokes physicality in both the operation of the instrument and the piano's call to dance. In contrast, Gabriele Cosmi's "Gaudix IV," the final movement from a concerto for piano and instrument, halts motion and nearly takes one's breath away with its mesmerizing intensity of emotion and sound.

Where the other cultivators of these aural grapes take a more poetic approach to composing, Antonio La Spina favors a systematic method. One that would make John Cage smile. The instructions for his "Ponti al telefono per l'iniziato, for piano and electronics" ("Bridges on the phone for the initiate") are elaborate and complex. He details the set up of the piano with precise placings of a coin, e-bow, a swiffer duster and the use of two pair of walkie-talkies plus a bluetooth speaker and bluetooth pedal, and a plastic guitar slide. La Spina gives exacting guidance for the performance, describing the actions to be taken by the left and right hands and the piano's pedals. All of which is modified by set and setting of the performance.

Both Marcello Pusceddu and Alessandro Milia's compositions are scored for two pair of hands. Like the coupled professions of enologist and harvester, each pianist is given a distinct tasks. For Milia's "Sound Trascendence," one pianist is at the keyboard and the second inside the instrument on the strings. Pusceddu's "Duoso" utilizes all twenty fingers of two pianists to reimagine Sardinian folk music with techniques drawn from minimalism.

Finally, our faithful sommelier, Claudio Sanna presents his own organic harvest with three performances. Teaming up with engineer Francesco Canetti and his electronic invention Torches on "Infinito, for piano and live electronics" and sound designer Paolo Pastorino for "Pietre di una esposizione." Then there is "Black And White Beats," written by Michele Sanna. It is a sort of organized Cecil Taylor somatic dance of hands on the keyboard. The emphasis on all three tracks is terroir, as his instrument is fermented by not only the soil, topography, and climate, but the invisible magnetic fields that surround the music.

Liner Notes copyright © 2025 Mark Corroto.

Compositori Sardi Contemporanei II can be purchased here.

Contact Mark Corroto at All About Jazz.
Mark misses his dogs Louie & Freddy, but endeavors daily to find and listen to new and interesting sounds.

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