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"While I was trying to write new material for my band The Lost Chords, I began to hear the sound of a trumpet. It wasn't the usual trumpet I heard when writing for big bands. It was elegant and eloquent. Ethereal yet earthy. It came from the headphones of my saxophonist, Andy Sheppard. It was the trumpet of Paolo Fresu."
So says Carla Bley, pianist but above all a great composer and bandleader, a protagonist of the avant-garde in the seventies, a collaborator with prestigious names like Paul Bley, George Russell, and Jimmy Giuffre, arranger of the most engaging pieces of the Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. Her Lost Chords, which include Steve Swallow on electric bass, Billy Drummond on drums, and the saxophones of Andy Sheppard, finally found Paolo Fresu in Berchidda, in the heart of Sardinia, invited to the festival that the trumpeter has been directing for years.
From this meeting and collaboration, an album was born, centered around a suite curiously named "The Banana Quintet" which features the number five as the undisputed protagonist: performed by a quintet, divided into five parts, all played on intervals of fifths and choruses of five bars. On paper, it might seem like a sterile exercise, but it's hard for a great composer like Bley to leave the emotional side of music out the door: indeed, the two horns gift us with moments of rare intensity, helped by the shared attitude of Fresu and Sheppard to forego acrobatic virtuosity (even though their technique would easily allow it) in favor of a constant search for sound, for the beauty of the most intense and profound notes that can be extracted, like buried treasures, from their respective instruments. The atmosphere is solemn and contemplative, here and there a hint of melancholy peeks out, but also the indispensable, ambiguous humor present in all the pianist's compositions. Noteworthy is Fresu's solo in the opening "One Banana", a captivating piece that you will find difficult to get out of your head.
A refined, lyrical album but above all full of a sound beauty that has few equals. The interplay between Fresu and Sheppard is fantastic; they seem to have been playing together for a lifetime. Swallow's bass provides a smooth and caressing rhythmic support, yet well-present, and his languid solos fit like precious stones in the general architecture of the music. Drummond is elegant and punctual, and Bley performs the miracle of "disappearing" into the folds of her music while continually suggesting chords that feed the soloists' imagination.
A work that will leave you divided between the pride of knowing that one of our musicians was chosen to be part of such a sophisticated and poignant ensemble, and the surprise at how everything happens in the most spontaneous and natural way possible. Only the greats can bring things out this way.
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