Review by: nightwalker10, (Monday, October 08, 2007) | Rating: * * * * °
GINO VANNELLI - Live In NAPLES
Parco Archeologico di Cuma - Pozzuoli (NA)
GINO VANNELLI feat. Michiel Borstlap
Gino Vannelli: vocals Michiel Borstlap: piano and keyboards Boudewijn Lucas: bass Erik Kooger: drums
Gino Vannelli probably boasts one of the most qualified and at the same time enthusiastic audiences you'll ever see at a concert, so don't be surprised if you spot Vittorio De Scalzi and Nico Di Palo from the legendary New Trolls quietly gathered, showering ecstatic comments on this extraordinary crooner who colored the evocative ruins of Cuma for one evening with his extraordinary voice.
The concert in Naples, the first of his life, showcased the sophisticated sound that has characterized the Canadian artist’s last decade, increasingly drawn to "combo jazz" atmospheres, now affectionately accepted even by some nostalgic aficionados of Vannelli's jazz fusion from the '70s. Vannelli’s artistic rigor and integrity, to which he has sacrificed a far more lucrative career, are legendary and can also be found in the nuances of his performances. Indeed, before the concert, he dedicates a long and meticulous soundcheck, searching for precise sounds that first put the frantic sound engineers to the test, and then enriched the show dominated by his powerful, malleable voice, full of nuances that allow him to literally stroll through the notes, climbing into the most unexpected tensions before relaxing into lush vocalizations.
Classic hits from his more pop past are transformed by daring arrangements, sometimes dry and angular, and harmonizations that primarily highlight Michiel Borstlap, a highly talented Dutch pianist (previously with Les Paul, Roy Hargrove, and Jimmy Haslip and the holder of personal projects including the beautiful "Body Acoustic," an acoustic reinterpretation of the Weather Report by the late Joe Zawinul), as well as the very young Erik Kooger, who enchanted the attentive audience with his polyrhythms, and the skilled Boudewijn Lucas on bass. But what perhaps, more than anything else, distinguished the performance in Cuma was a masterful use of dynamics that delighted the audience with an alternation of frenetic bebop phrases, deadly break stops, clusters of chromaticism, and hypnotic electric piano voicings.
Gino Vannelli's concert avoided, with modesty, easy indulgences in past hits, delving instead into new songs featured on the upcoming CD created by Vannelli with this lineup, presenting himself more as the frontman of a group than as a true soloist, thus leaving ample and well-deserved space for the instrumental talent of the musicians. And here, for example, the beautiful ballad "Don’t Give Up on Me" or the pulsing "Knight of the Road" showcase all his abilities as a composer, arranger, and chameleon-like performer, in his own way an "orchestra conductor" with Davis-like intuitions, where jazz, soul, and melody are transfigured without boundaries of genre or fashion: his live music is absolutely unpredictable moment by moment. The music unfolds with naturalness and charm up to the closing number, which naturally goes to "I Just Wanna Stop" in a slow version sung with the audience, the only true concession of the evening, one might say, to his pop past, which, as he sings in a new song, "I buried my castles in Spain and my fifteen minutes of glory six feet under."
Only a minor flaw in an efficient organization for the approximately six hundred who turned out to see him, an unusual brevity of the show (about an hour and a half) for an artist always very generous, but he later indulged in the ritual of photos and autographs for his always very enthusiastic Italian audience, who tried to echo him with "where's Joe?" (the keyboardist brother emblematic of the pop period) or to ask him for old tracks, but he smiles patiently and kindly and with a wave, disappears into the dressing room.
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