Rino Arbore - Temporary Life? (2021)

After having explored the world of rituals and grief in his album “The Roots of Unity”, Rino Arbore - in this record titled “temporary life?” - deals with several thorny ethical issues: the ability to resist evil, indifference or empathy with other people’s suffering and the value of life. As starting point there are three mug shots of Czeslawa Koka, a Polish girl interned in Auschwitz who died in 1943 at 14 years old, after only three months of detention. She was probably killed by a phenol injection. Wilhelm Brasse, the photographer of the camp, portrayed her posing in three different ways, as Nazi used to “identify” their prisoners: a frontal photo and two profile photos. His shots depict a terrified little girl, with her head shaved and a wound on her lip: the same Brasse then reported that the girl, who couldn’t grasp a single word of German and that felt like she was thrown with her mother in an incomprehensible horror, in the picture had just been beaten by a Kapo with a stick. In the photos she stays motionless in shock and with fear. The album “temporary life?” is dedicated to Czeslawa Koka and to Brasse. In fact the titles of the tracks are conceived to suggest a sort of narration of their life stories. The powerful and tense music is entrusted to a classical jazz quintet, that is classical on paper alone: you are not going to listen to unison themes and long solos accompanied by rhythmic music. The music texture is more complex and free, as it follows a chamber-music cosmetic that continuously divides the group in smaller units, until the rhythm is entrusted to single musicians. More compact tracks in the name of free-bop, like “Czeslawa cries”, “The train at dawn” or “Dance of pigs”, alternate with more sophisticated tracks like “Temporary life?” or the final “Corpi inutili” (Useless bodies). The tune is suggestive and alienating in “L’amore in fondo” (Love at the bottom), a typical shady ballad whose secret is known by Arbore. All the involved musicians play in a marvellous way: Rubini with his zigzagging paths, Distante with is lyric pathos, Vendola with his warm presence and D’Ambrosio with his always dramatically meaningful contribution, to end with Arbore’s guitar, that directs the rhythm and colour of music. All this contributes to mark a work whose beauty and stunning depth will stay with us for a long time.