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Rating: The magazine "Musica Jazz," with its June issue, has truly gifted jazz enthusiasts with the accompanying album "Duet Improvisation for Yardbird" by Massimo Urbani and Mike Melillo. The fact that the album had been out of print for some time, finding new light thanks to the magazine and the Philology boss Paolo Piangarelli, was the added value to the tribute the magazine wanted to make for the twentieth anniversary of Urbani's death, which falls precisely in these days.
Starting from the beginning, from 1987, thanks to the already mentioned Piangerelli who was somewhat the musical cupid of this operation, Massimo Urbani met Mike Melillo in this unusual collaboration that would see them as protagonists in a duo, without any filters of a rhythm section. At this point, knowing a bit about Urbani's history, his proclaimed adherence to Parker's style, it is easy to make conjectures with Mike Melillo who was alongside Phil Woods, that is, someone often indicated among the most credible saxophonists to take up the mantle left by Bird and who ultimately, of Bird, not only took the musical torch but also his wife. Therefore an album without filters, in which being in a duo will further bring to light the beauty of the more intimate exchanges between Urbani's sax and Melillo's piano.
Usually, when you purchase an album, especially a jazz one, one of the first things is, certainly, to glance at the tracklist to see if there are standards, so as to "compare them" with other performances, other versions scattered here and there in the history of jazz; and with the tracklist of "Duet Improvisation for Yardbird" Massimo and Melillo take a dive into a part of the sea of standards dear to Bird and which we will also find, in part, in other records throughout Urbani's career; for example, starting with "Everything Happens to Me," truly a battle horse of Urbani and which the Roman saxophonist will leave with one last and definitive splendid version in his musical testament — coincidentally also this "Parkerian," "The Blessing" of 1993; and it is precisely in this piece that the chiaroscuro accents of Urbani's phrasing, enhanced by Melillo's, represent indeed the ideal prelude for the '93 version, just as the brilliant and decadent accents of Melillo's piano will restore the allure in "All the Things You Are." Along the way, there will also be room for "Out of Nowhere," a very informal version, of high level certainly, even though, in the modest opinion of the writer, less witty for instance than the version recorded on the eponymous album with the Sicilian pianist Giuseppe Emmanuele's group. Yes, perhaps it's pieces like these from which the ear, as the main reason, maybe doesn't manage to dispense with a rhythm section. But it is with "Lover Man" that Urbani and Melillo reach the highest emotional peak, hardly conquerable, and that with poignant force that it evokes, it's as if in front of the eyes passed Forest Whitaker in the role of Parker in Clint Eastwood's "Bird," in the famous scene where Bird finds himself in a car with the night lights passing by and grazing his discomfort, and the subsequent dramatic recording session: Urbani has reached there, where it's difficult to reach, where he has reached with the awareness and the weight of being the best man of all. You others, if you don't want to waste time with the back issues, take a leap to the newsstand.
Always dear to me was this solitary Alto sax
Just because the album was recorded in Recanati...
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