Vito Di Modugno - Organ Trio plus Guest (2007)

It is not possible to ignore a premise. There are very few musicians in Italy, and even in Europe, who hear music, who live it and wear it as if it were the most beautiful piece of clothing, that of the most beautiful days. There are few musicians who have polyhedria in their DNA. Well, that said let's talk about one of these rarities: Vito Di Modugno, now on his third album as a leader, fired for the glorious and historically attentive to the best signatures, Red Records and, by now, in the arengo of national musicians and beyond.

Di Modugno is a multi-instrumentalist who can move, with equal skill, between the piano, the fender, the hammond and the bass. In this adventure he is joined by Pietro Condorelli on guitar, Massimo Manzi on drums and by the "guests": Michele Carrabba on tenor and Pino Di Modugno, father of ours, on accordion.

The inspiration is evident from the first song, Haitian Fight Song, a tribute to Charles Mingus, lived and played with vibrant fluency. Then an alternation of songs characterized by wide-ranging sounds, where Vito Di Modugno talks now with a particularly inspired Condorelli (Ok The Time is Right, Delgado), now with Carabba, a tenorist who knows how to embroider angled tones like few others, without getting lost in empty axioms (If, The Big), or, again, with his father, an unstoppable accordion phantasist and profound connoisseur of harmonic and melodic fabrics also of popular tradition: Pino Di Modugno, who in Got a Match by Chick Corea, works the sound in such a way as to make it paroxysmal engaging. The dynamic textures of Massimo Manzi perfectly amalgamate the melodic and rhythmic components that see Vito Di Modugno, energetically, originate paths of all kinds.

The Zita di Ceglie deserves a particular mention for a Barese d.o.c. Syncretic representation of sounds, smells, colors of the Apulian tradition, as it is in the phrase (abandoned girlfriend, but this "translation" is reductive with respect to the historical anamnesis).

A vigorous and virulent, contagious work.
Alceste Ayroldi for Jazzitalia