M E D I A

That European jazz, including that of Italian origin, no longer has anything to learn or envy from that of the United States, is now something that even the stones know. The peculiarities and styles manifested by this musical genre in the old continent boast, in fact, a main characteristic, that of boasting performers whose performance preparation is of an absolute level, even if sometimes, and this may be the only flaw, if so we want to define it, instead the compositional originality is missing, the material substance of the sound construct, as if there were still, on an unconscious level, the block that seizes the younger brother in the face of the unconditional admiration he feels towards of his older brother, despite not being inferior to him in terms of genius and brilliance.

Genius and brilliance which, returning to the sphere of local jazz, are not lacking from the first listen to the Melodrum Trio, composed of Salvatore Spano on piano, Salvatore Maltana on double bass and Francesco Brancato on drums and percussion, who recorded for the Da Vinci Jazz the album The Man, the Earth, the Sky. This is their third recording project and represents, in a certain sense, the result of a now acquired maturation, in the face of a research which in the two previous CDs has undoubtedly come to terms with the other exquisitely cultured musical genre, namely the tied to what we crudely and improperly define as “classical music”. In fact, if their first album, Perspectives (dating back to 2015), was dedicated by them to some female figures from the world of opera, and the second, Tony's Dream (published three years later), was inspired by the abstract reworking of the visionary musical world of Antonio Vivaldi, The Man, the Earth, the Sky is the typical scab that is detached from a now healed wound, that is to say a protective sedimentation that no longer has any reason to exist before to the awareness of not only expressive, but also and above all compositional means, no longer blatantly indebted to another genre.

Mind you, even listening to this third work of theirs, that genre continues to hover, but it no longer has the function of a cow from whose udders the lymphatic milk of a creative genesis must be squeezed so that the result has its own reason. It is very clear that the Trio in question has a classical matrix in its DNA, but it should now be understood as a projection rather than as a constitutive skeleton of their music; referring to a noble example, that of the legendary The Modern Jazz Quartet, it is as if Salvatore Spano embodied the spirit of John Lewis, whose classical training and eviscerated and unconditional love for Bach's music came to terms with the dimension jazz of Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke, with the precise task of doing the same towards Salvatore Maltana and Francesco Brancato, whose musical training, on the contrary, is devoted body and soul to jazz. But what the Melodrum Trio manages to formulate in the compositional field is more based on the meeting, rather than on the clash, as instead happened with The Modern Jazz Quartet, that is, the work of stylistic mediation appears more organic, more natural and more fluid .

Here, listening to their third work, what immediately catches the ear is precisely this fluidity, the ability to blend the great classical lesson with the clear, clean-cut needs of a music that makes jazz themes its undisputed virtue. If you listen to what John Lewis and his companions did, you will always notice the presence of a "polyphonic" cage which effectively forced the quartet to give life to wonderful compositions which made the listener focus his gaze on a more or less remote past, which however this does not happen with the three artists of the Melodrum Trio: the lesson is there, but it does not create a compositional and expressive cage. If anything, it is the meeting of multiple languages ​​that ideally harmonize into one, and therefore I would recommend listening to The Man, the Earth, the Sky starting from the last song which, emblematically, is entitled Esperanto, whose semantic power is expressed precisely in the harmonic blend in which the construct naturally flows from a classical inspiration, given by Spano's piano which fleetingly echoes the Goldbergs Bachian variations, with a jazz dimension without the presence of forcing, of crystallizations, of momentary fixations from one genre to another, since the transition from one to the other is almost not felt, such is the compositional ability implemented.

In short, flowing, giving meaning to a continuous timbral and expressive liquidity, can be the watchword with which to approach this album. And this figure, the genome that governs the music of the three local artists, is also palpable in those songs in which the "experimental" need wanted to have its say: take as an example Prince Alma Hundida (Para Thomas), whose presence, in the second part of the piece, a fragment of the political-social appeal recorded by Thomas Sankara (at the time of the presidency of Burkina Faso) has the same function of superstructure inserted in the sound structure, typical in compositional philosophy of a brilliant and revolutionary musician like Franco Evangelisti, one of the putative fathers of the Nuova Consonanza, who, among other things, had a fruitful relationship with the jazz genre.