Stefano Pastor: Songs

Songs is virtuoso Italian violinist Stefano Pastor's attempt to explore song form through his solo violin, aided only by different sound processors and his voice—feeling the sound of his voice as well as his violin physically, inside his body, and directly, without anything but his own body, as Pastor writes in the liner notes.

On this album, Pastor deconstructs and reconstructs the melodies of six well-known songs in an attempt to claim their melodies as his own. He has the technical sophistication and boundless energy to rearrange the jazz standard of George and Ira Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" into a an impressive and dense technical tour-de-force that does not leave much of the original beautiful and sophisticated melody within these cerebral virtuoso show-offs. The distortion-laden arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" proves that a violin can follow the legendary guitarist's exact guitar lines, 45 years after the original performance of the song. The vocal execution pales in comparison to Hendrix's passionate delivery, however.

Pastor shows much more restraint and imagination on his arrangements of two Brazilian songs, "Beatriz" and "Quem è você," where he sings softly and emotionally. J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie's "You Go to My Head" and Charles Mingus' "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love" both receive similar, sensitive arrangements. The use of electronic devices on these songs assists Pastor in transfiguring the sound of the violin, turning his arrangements and elaborate improvisations into a multitude of carefully arranged orchestral sounds.

Songs is an unbalanced work, split between trips of excess and imaginative performances.