Andrea Paganetto - Ianua (2023) Hi Res

Liverno, Andrea Paganetto's penultimate album, had given us a strong impression and the measure of a musician who would continue to be talked about. Ianua, his latest work confirms what has been said about him and we could add that with this album we are on the threshold of artistic maturity, both from the point of view of sound and composition. One feels that his voice is maturing, it belongs to him just like the ideas he puts into it. His gaze on jazz is 360 degrees as well as his mental openness towards other music. "Ianua" is a beautiful and varied record, full of sounds and with distinguished guests such as Francesco Bearzatti and Anais Drago who enhance its profile. "Ianua" is the old name of Genoa, and is synonymous with openness to other cultures and worlds that bathe in the Mediterranean. Paganetto plays what he hears, what comes to him with the wind and brings with him, not only smells but also sounds, languages, rhythms and colours. Those colors that have South American movements and characterize the trend of La Porta, a composition full of meanings and which opens the disc like a Pandora's box. "El Gato" Barbieri is heard in that passage, not his music but the Latin essence of his rural tales. Paganetto's stories, different from each other but united by an important research and sound variety, have names that tend towards the idiom, and they charge the listener's imagination as in Le forme del mare. Then there is Abidan, a piece by Zorn moved to the east and embroidered with the notes of Anais Drago. The magnificent Teseo by Brunod, with its Nordic and impressionist atmospheres, is embellished even more by the incursions of Bearzatti. And so Ianua goes on among surprises, sounds and stories told and imagined to which they lend their voice as experienced jazz sailor musicians.