Rodolfo Cervetto - Esperanto (2020)

Esperanto was the attempt to relate different languages to a lexical and grammatical common denominator, thus assuring a basis for communication to as many people as possible. This sounds as if it were the outline of jazz events, which, in any case, were not an attempt but rather good history, i.e, action carried out in the course of time that has shaped a community of purposes and values.

Luca Falomi is trained in classical music and has a vivid, incisive and silvery touch in his right hand and meandering deftness in his left hand. Still every song he has composed clearly shows it is heartfelt and comes from a place that is nobody’s and everybody’s land at the same time, a place where every music culture has thrived and brought fragrant contributions to jazz. The keystones supporting the framework of sound have been the same for the last five hundred years nearly all over the world, the tangle of notes that we might define Afro-Mediterranean and the ones which, arising from there, later simply and naturally became Caribbean Afro-American and Latin-American notes. Jelly Roll Morton said one century ago that the essential ingredients of jazz are creativity, surprise and an expert sprinkling of “latin tinge”.

Riccardo Barbera is a contrabass player who has always been able to broaden the pure vocabulary, grammar and syntax of jazz by successfully going deeper into the musics of the world that require no passport or identity card: a changing and extraordinarily rich world that the West has long considered “alien”, busy as it was to look at itself in a distorting mirror, and that jazz has managed to merge.

Rudi Cervetto, on the other hand, is a drummer who loves playing with his instrument, urging it to respond in the most diverse and creative ways, even by means of inventive and heterodox gestures. Frank Zappa said once that music is the art of decorating time, therefore one of the instruments that was invented to take time may be, all the more so, a brush painting on a canvas made of instants. In case of need, however, he displays powerful rhythmic nerves, a drive rousing the players he shares the stage with to a forcibly induced dance.

It is now understood that such an ensemble can expand and welcome any kind of timbre and faster time on stage as well as in a recording studio: a small and coloured orchestra is currently being formed, and there is no limit to the nuances of colours in the world. For the time being, let’s enjoy them as resounding as they are, while taking into account that here the refined and burning passion coming from Fausto Beccalossi’s accordion and Javier Girotto’s saxophone provide further seals of intensity in their embodiments of the latin tinge: it tallies.

Guido Festinese