Alessandro Magnanini
Someway Still I Do

I'm letting you know - just as the new album by Mario Biondi has just been released - about the release of the first album by the Emilia-born musician Alessandro "Duka" Magnanini (author of the hit song "This Is What You Are", which introduced Mario Biondi, for whom Magnanini has been a writer, producer, and conductor over the years); the eclectic Magnanini actually also has a past as a virtuoso guitarist for Cesare Cremonini's band: in fact, he also appears as such in the latest work of the Bolognese singer-songwriter, "Il primo bacio sulla luna," but I particularly remember him excelling in this role during the Maggese Theatre Tour of 2005, immortalized in the CD+DVD "1+8+24."

Magnanini's album is titled "Someway Still I Do" and has received several extremely flattering reviews online, to which it is my pleasure to now add my own. It is released by the independent record label Schema Records, for which Mario Biondi's "Handful Of Soul" was also released at the time.

The tracks are almost all sung in English (except for one) by various performers: Liam McKahey, known as the voice of Cousteau; Rosalia de Sousa (already in an album with Nicola Conte); Jenny B, who won the youth category at Sanremo 2000, and others.

It's an album that manages to be refined and "very classy" but also - at the same time - easily and delightfully listenable. And combining these two qualities, as we know, is not an easy thing at all...

Although on iTunes and elsewhere it is classified somewhat simplistically as "jazz" genre, in my opinion, a genuinely jazz-inspired atmosphere can perhaps be felt only in the instrumental tracks "Greetings From Here" (with a beautiful solo vibraphone by Pasquale Bardaro) and "Blind Date Blues" (I mainly refer to the moments when the solo piano of Luca Mannutza and the flugelhorn of Fabrizio Bosso respectively appear); then there is a third instrumental track, "Suddenly...", which instead has nothing to do with jazz, I'd say, because it's Latin, enveloping and intriguing, with a lovely accordion and the virtuoso solo trumpet always by Fabrizio Bosso (an artist who needs no introduction; he plays throughout the album but particularly in this piece he leaves me truly speechless).

In the sung tracks, with their taste for orchestration and precious wind inserts, I find myself, personally, breathing in a very pleasant - and even more so for me, as it immediately takes me back to the time when I was a child - a slightly retro atmosphere reminiscent of soundtracks from great films of the 60s; moreover, in the three tracks sung by Jenny B (powerful and captivating, in particular, are "Open Up Your Eyes" and the single "Secret Lover"... And what a fabulous voice! I remembered her as talented and skilled, but not to this extent) Shirley Bassey also comes to mind. Listening to Jenny B on this album, I wonder what sense those so-called talent (?) shows ever have, other than to wholesale a stack of CDs by talentless people, when instead genuine talents like this girl have been floating in semi-anonymity (if not in complete anonymity) for over a decade...

Returning to the album, it's truly a great album: an album to have, for me.