Gianfranco Menzella - Double Face (2019)

Double Face, the last album by Gianfranco Menzella, is programmatically a work on the "double". The balance and the relationship between woodwinds, the structural / studio ambiguity in the approach to the tracks, the freedom to adhere to or betray a style like game and linguistic paradox. And again, the hard bop key, with themes and long-term solos, seen with the interesting critical distance of playing and recording without rehearsals. There is an important question hidden on the record.

Wherever it flows as a karstic but perceptible trace: is it possible today, in African American music, to indulge in an ideal of spiritual elevation without betraying or losing the train of a liberating and orgiastic tradition? Is there still a piece of popular culture in this highly biennial jazz flowering?

In this regard, the Hard Bop, the one that is consumed inveterate in jazz clubs and clubs, reveals itself here as an opportunity for ideological clarity. The size of the small live, in fact, has always been congenial to Gianfranco Menzella, as a chance to turn, to show himself with the instrument directly to the public, to be himself mediator between high and low, between spirit and sense. As if music were a kind of bath of uncontrollable intentions in which to immerse a phrasing instead long meditated, filtered and stripped of all seduction. In this work of study, together with the excellent traveling companions, Menzella evokes the nature of the local to an abstract dimension and desire. A monastic aspect that takes over and somehow moves the communicative axis all within the interplay experiences.

The relationship with J. Magnarelli (trumpet), Bruno Montrone (piano), Adam Pache (drums), Luca Fattorini (double bass) is in this sense an interesting exchange of words between instrumental families. (Omitted)