Rita Marcotulli
The Woman Next Door

Improvisation has a lot to do with "memory," with what has nourished our sensitivity, our feelings, our emotions, and our thoughts over time, layering within our consciousness.... Beyond the world of sounds, my music has been influenced by many other experiences—artistic, literary, visual, and, naturally, cinematic. In particular, I have always felt strong affinities between the poetic world I tried to express and that of one of the most ingenious filmmakers of all time: François Truffaut. The nostalgia of childhood, the vocation to escape, the respect for shyness, the ambiguity of love, the sense of life's flow, the conflict between innocence and experience run through Truffaut's entire filmography, and those same feelings are often behind the notes of my compositions and improvisations.

A tribute to cinema, and particularly to François Truffaut, from Rita Marcotulli could not be more unsurprising. The Roman pianist, born into classical music and then transitioned to jazz, has always held in high regard a multimedia approach to art, lending her piano to collaborations with personalities from dance and visual arts. Marcotulli also has a privileged relationship with France, having shared an important personal friendship with the late pianist Michel Petrucciani.

Among the numerous collaborators on the album, the names of trumpeter Enrico Rava, saxophonists Stefano di Battista and Javier Girotto, drummer Roberto Gatto, and bassist Michel Benita stand out. Crucial, as it will be in the subsequent "Koiné," is the contribution of electronics and samples from the wizard Maurizio Martusciello, known as "Metaxu." The renowned drummer Aldo Romano offers a vocal cameo in "Les Enfants S'Ennuient le Dimanche."

The work consistently stays on the coordinates of lightness and originality, but with peaks of absolute excellence. It also contains some tracks that remain indelibly etched in memory: unforgettable, for example, is the duet between Rava's trumpet and Di Battista's soprano sax in the ethereal "Les 400 Coups." Exotic atmospheres and "musette" sounds are not spared, achieved through the use of an ensemble of diatonic accordions.

Marcotulli is highly adept at crafting a successful mix of easy and complex, confidently manipulating the most diverse musical genres, as happens in "Masse Di Memoria." Anyone who has seen "Fahrenheit 451" will undoubtedly recognize the multilingual chant of the "book people," who have no other choice to pass on books but to memorize them: "We are a minority of undesirables shouting in the desert...". A chant that, unexpectedly, explodes into a furious tarantella, popular and folksy, accompanied by raucous cries of women and barrio chatter.

The track "Antoine Doinel" is the result of a fascinating manipulation: the rhythm is extracted from the Morse code transcription of the names "Antonie Doinel" and "Christine Darbonne," the protagonists of the film "Baci Rubati." This otherwise dry sequence of dots and dashes becomes highly musical and evocative in the skilled hands of Rita... To be honest, the version on the record does not fully do justice to the operation, but if among you there is some fortunate who has seen this piece performed live, they know exactly what I mean...

To conclude in style, here is "Fragment (Of The Third Kind)." Mother Rita tucks us into bed, lulling us with the five most famous notes in cinema history, those from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Spielberg entrusts Truffaut himself with the task of communicating with space...

After listening, you realize you've taken a world tour in sixty-five minutes, touching on multiple facets of a diverse, kaleidoscopic musical universe. Fans of "Koiné" (the album that brought her fame with the general public) might be pleased to discover that she was already making such unclassifiable music five years earlier...

No point in turning to your trusted storekeeper: the proverbial foresight of record labels has claimed another victim, dooming this album to the oblivion of "out of print." Once again, we'll have to make a virtue of necessity...