(Emarcy 0602537863877. CD Review by Alison Hoblyn)
Everyone likes a good story - and this album contains fourteen of them, with pictures too.
Saxophonist Tommaso Starace is known for his love of cinema and photography and this new CD follows that passion by musically illustrating some intriguing black and white photos, displayed in the sleeve booklet. They're the work of esteemed Italian photographer Gianni Berengo Giardin, a man with an archive of about one and a half million images and recipient of the Lucie award for lifetime achievement (previously awarded to Henri Cartier-Bresson). And they're iconically Italian.
Starace admits that, although he has enjoyed the stimulus of living in London for the last 20 years, he's ' succumbed to a healthy homesickness and nostalgia for the memories of...childhood'. With his Italian quartet, Michele Di Toro, piano, Attilio Zanchi, bass, Tommy Bradaschio, drums with Paolo Fresu guesting on trumpet and flugelhorn, Starace has recorded some strong melodic compositions, 'in tune with the elements that make Italian music so famous throughout the world.' More, they're almost cinematic theme tunes and immensely evocative. Starace says that it was such a pleasure to choose the pictures of cities he grew up knowing..Milan, Venice, Naples... and make a tribute to these places; 'they bring peace to to me'. Starace majors on positive feelings. he wanted the whole album to make the listener feel good at the end and says when he plays he, and his colleagues, play for the audience not just for themselves. It works for me.
The album opens with Recollections, the soundtrack to a picture of a couple on the beach of the Venice Lido in 1958, dancing somewhat giddily to a portable gramophone. Starace imagined an old couple looking back fondly to the fun of their youth and there's a haunting melody that stitches present to future. In Motion in Stillness, the soprano sax of the piece reels and careers alongside the image of a whirling merry go round covered with the blurred images of children whilst the bass part tethers the solid and still form of the attendant priest who stands beside them. Starace says this image brought back childhood memories of the 'oratorio'- where children from religious families would go on the weekend, to learn their catechism and socialise with other kids under the benevolent eye of the Catholic father.
One of my favourites is actually not a Starace composition but by Zanchi. Ravel's Waltz is achingly poignant; the picture of a couple kissing under a Venetian portico shows them in the perspective of that moment - but what moment? Zanchi sees the couple about to set off on a waltz; I wonder if it's a goodbye, a last waltz? The instruments set up a dialogue - it's up to the listener to eavesdrop on the intimacy of the conversation...
read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/PD6hQqqeW0O3_xNoj3snpA
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