Vito Liturri Trio: Desires and Fears

Every city one walks through is a different dream. Every piece of music that vibrates across time and space is also a dream—an assertion framed to perfection by the Vito Liturri Trio's Desires And Fears.

Italian pianist Liturri takes his inspiration from his countryman Italo Calvino's fantastical 1972 novel, Invisible Cities (Giudio Einaudi), a Nebula Award-nominated book that features Marco Polo's descriptions—to Emperor Kublai Khan—of 55 cities he (Polo) has experienced. The tales/prose poems told by Polo are short, often bizarre, kaleidoscopic and evocative of anything that might be dredged up from the readers' imaginations given the input: the tale of a new city, the new sounds therein, the architecture and the streets and the milling crowds. The trio's music in the spirit of Invisible Cities is similarly evocative.

Liturri presents his interpretations of eight of Calvino's city stories here, leading us on a sonic walking tour of "Zenobia," "Valdrada," Marozia," "Smeraldina," "Armina," etc., all chapters taken from Calvino's novel. The tunes contain twists and turns, improvisatory beauty, vibrant juxtapositions of mainstream jazz and an electronic, avant-garde element via the inclusion of a good deal of deft, boldly-applied synthesizer experimentation. It is music that can elicit mental pop-ups that, from the corner of an alley, slide into the imagination—welcome forays and visions married to the composition's main themes, but also different from them, tangentially, but still attached to the original circle.

The disc's closer, "Invenzione a due" ("Invention of Two") has Liturri alone at the piano, presenting a blissful, probably improvised piece.

Desires And Fears is an approachable, cerebral set of sounds—beautiful and futuristic—that draws the imagination into crafting mental cityscapes; an invitation into labyrinthine journey's into the mind, into explorations of invisible and imaginary cities.