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Rating: A piano, a double bass, a drum kit, and many, many stories to tell. Stories that speak of struggle and the pride felt when the sense of belonging to something is tangible. Stories that speak of interrupted paths, of filthy parades perhaps corrupted, of vain labor. Stories that speak of other stories, suspended in time and in popular memory, turned into legends and then shrouded in the tear gas of the Riot Police. Stories that start from afar, from 1969, that pass through the years of lead and reach us in a new guise, under the new light that the events that occurred during the G8 in Genoa bring back to us.
Gaetano Liguori tells us, through national-popular jazz, his impressions of the vortex of tension that shows no sign of abating. Too many questions that find no answer, too much hypocrisy, too many half-truths hidden behind forced and inappropriate smiles.
The notes of the piano convey insecurity, precariousness, distrust. They are not particularly complicated constructs; on the contrary, they are rather catchy lullabies and litanies. I like to think this was a deliberate choice by the authors: the message, to be received, must enjoy the most suitable means of communication to be directly transmitted into the head of the receiver.
Indeed, we find a jazz that is not too complex, where improvisation does not exceed into academia for its own sake. Open this novel of stories and begin to read.
The first story, built around an obsessive, repetitive, and nauseating pedal, reflects the content of the entire book. A sound particularly devoid of high frequencies, to give the idea of a gloomy sky, brief sprints depicting the irrational movements of the masses. We are reading "Genova G8" and we are about to leaf through "The Man Who Would Be King." Now, it's not up to me to say to whom it refers, but any reference is NOT purely coincidental. Do Rudyard Kipling and John Huston ring a bell? Here comes “Il Comandante,” with epic and melodramatic passages, clear references to the figure of Che Guevara. I read in an interview that the author did not want to refer solely to the "Proud Revolutionary" but also to the other great figures of socialism.
"Slightly Out of Focus" is an “onomatopoeic” song: the title says it all. Pay particular attention to the double bass solo in this song, a solo more than ever detached, dissonant, fragmented, almost out of tune but very revolutionary.
Generally, the development of the songs is pedantic: introductions of a few notes, modal development, and returning to calmness. There are continuous moments of deliberate confusion, agitation, generic anxiety aimed at catapulting us into those parades, those streets, those struggles.
All united under the same flag, then? No, this isn't so, it would be incorrect, even if stated by someone who debuted discographically with a work titled “Cile Libero, Cile Rosso.” But there is another flag under which we should unite: it's one of despair and this, yes, this seems inevitable to me.
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