Mark Murphy, Mario Piacentini, Marco Tamburini, Piero Leveratto & Marco Tonin - Live in Italy 2001 (2001/2019)

This unprecedented 2001 Mark Murphy concert is a precious document that reminds us of one of the greatest vocalists in the history of jazz, the most eclectic and creative of his generation. The presence of Marco Tamburini — then 42-year-old — increases in the compact in a dazzling quartet with Marco Piacentini, Piero Leveratto and Marco Tonin.

On May 18, 2001 the Syracuse singer was invited to Brescia to open the first "Jazz and Literature Review" as a great interpreter of the vocalese and exemplary continuator of the meeting between bop and poetry, born in San Francisco with the Beat Generation. At the age of 69, Murphy fully maintained the adventurous, eclectic and passionate style that had made him a cult figure in a limited circle of admirers. He received awards in Down Beat critics, but he was too personal to respond to the tastes of mass audiences, like Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra did. His nature as an extrovert and eccentric improviser, always reckless, emerged best in front of small audiences, generally in a club.

The Brescia concert at the Franciscanum Theater follows a year of the splendid performance of the singer at the Dakota Bar & Grill in St. Paul, Minnesota, published in The Latin Porter and its performance recalls the Viennese exhibition of 1990, present in Bop for Miles. Murphy highlights his stature as vehemently vocal bopper, able to combine rhythmic freedom, expressive eccentricity and coloristic sensitivity in pyrotechnic scat improvisations. It happens in many songs, proving to be exciting in the tight execution of "Milestones" (a superlative Tamburini) and in "Parker's Mood," reckless warhorse from the engraving by Bop for Kerouac (Muse, 1981). But the disc does not lack the introspective side of Murphy's style, balladeur never taken for granted, always prone to chromatic and rhythmic variations, in a rare balance between colloquial and singing dimension.

Let us remember "My One and Only Love" (with exemplary solos by Piacentini and Tamburini) and a masterly version of the Heltonian "Do Nothin 'Till You Hear from Me" (alone accompanying the piano), the most enchanting moment of the concert. On that evening Murphy performed other songs, such as "Autumn Leaves," "Farmer's Market," "Stolen Moments," not included in this compact. Perhaps a second volume is planned?