Frank Gambale
Raison d’Etre

LA RECENSIONE

Guitar hero par excellence of the nineties, Frank Gambale was the idol of rock, jazz, and fusion guitarists around the world. One of the few able to combine an alien technique with extraordinary taste, the Australian guitarist has always had one of his key strengths in his constant stylistic evolution, moving through the most disparate genres, not least the album with Maurizio Colonna, featuring only classical guitar.

The new "Gambalian" revolution aims to destroy one of the harmonic limits of the guitar, its tuning, experimenting, in this new CD (debuting with ESC), with a new solution that expands the harmonic possibilities on the higher notes, allowing the guitar to explore entirely unusual harmonic solutions.
As for the album's content, it can be divided into a first fusion part and a second, more jazz section. The most interesting part is undoubtedly the first, where Gambale plays with the new tuning and one can hear rather unusual voicings, almost as if a piano were playing them.
Thus, we move from the funky 5/4 of "Cachination" to the ballad "Table For One", through the acoustic "Melodique", which anticipates the guitar-drum improvisation (by the way, the drummer is a certain Billy Cobham...) of "Two Minutes B.C."
The compositional level of the album may not always be exhilarating, but "Raison d’Etre" opens new horizons for the guitar of the new millennium.