Marcello Tonolo, Michele Polga, Domenico Santaniello & Massimo Chiarella - Puccini in Jazz (2014)

It is hard to comment in just a few lines a work of such complexity and relevance, dedicated to the elaboration of Puccini’s arias, a project that Marcello Tonolo has kept in the closet far too long. It seems more functional for our purpose to borrow some passages of the long but illuminating cover notes of the album, signed by the musicologist Paolo Cecchi. “…«Puccini in Jazz» presents nine songs whose themes are drawn from some of the most famous works of the Lucca native composer («Manon Lescaut», «Bohème», «Tosca», «La fanciulla del West» and «Madama Butterfly»), in arrangements and rework done for the most part by Marcello Tonolo, but with important contributions from Michele Polga and Domenico Santaniello, members of the quartet, and from his brother Pietro, who had already performed with him the same repertoire in a duo. …the risk of conceiving aesthetically inert overlaps and intersections between jazz and classical music is cleverly avoided here, since Puccini’s melodies are used in the album as mere material, subject to manipulation and various modifications, thus avoiding any melodic sketching and ambient complacency… In many compositions, the sometimes radical changes in the configuration of the harmonic melodies of Puccini become crucially important; the melodies are partially deprived of their original characterization, and transformed into dynamic and mobile structures, whose new chord sequences work fine as harmonic frame over which the improvisation of soloists develop … There is, in almost all of the pieces, a constant search for less usual and more articulated formal paths, involving successions diversified between thematic segments and parts for solo improvisations, with particularly good results in titles like Ma non nell’intermezzo and Mimi … Fanciulla, the most enthralling composition in the album, begins with a piano introduction reminiscent of the rhythmic impetus of some McCoy Tyner’s tunes (we think of Passion Dance, for example) … “.