Stefano Cantini
L'Amico Del Vento

L'Amico Del Vento is one of those albums that every artist must confront sooner or later... The love for melody and for our great authors of the 20th century has left a strong mark on my way of expressing myself... I remember listening to Mascagni and Puccini with such interest as a child. It's as if this album has finally broken down all the barriers that others have always erected between Jazz and Classical Music inside me.

Stefano "Cocco" Cantini, between a session at the Follonica city council (where he is the cultural officer), directing various jazz festivals in Tuscany, composing soundtracks for cinema and theater, and teaching activities, remembers (rarely unfortunately) that he is a saxophonist of high caliber, refined and gifted, especially on the soprano sax, with a very wide dynamic range and a truly unique timbre.

"L'Amico Del Vento" features a rather atypical ensemble, including Cantini, Rita Marcotulli on piano, Lello Pareti on double bass, plus the support of the Arké String Project, which has gained much fame recently, thanks to a series of successful collaborations with musicians from both the jazz world (Trilok Gurtu) and pop music. Here, however, unlike many "jazz with strings" albums, the use of the quartet is not seen as a simple harmonic support, but of great participation in the melodies and rhythms: the choice to eliminate the drums can be seen precisely in the perspective of giving as much space as possible to the strings, which notoriously suffer from sound pressure. Credit also goes to conductor and arranger Mauro Grossi, who grants the string quartet the dignity of a true solo instrument.

As expected in a work of this kind, the more suave and caressing themes are favored, although when needed, the strings reveal themselves capable of swinging copiously and Rita Marcotulli's piano starts like a true sound train, as happens in the track "Come nei Film", moreover rich with delightful quotations from the most beautiful soundtracks of Italian cinema. Curious but also very convincing is the revival made in "La Grande Antenna", a piece by Grossi inspired by "Saturno" by Roberto Lupi, which once closed RAI television broadcasts, and which moves between cultured and dreamlike atmospheres.

But where sweetness and simplicity win, both Cantini and Marcotulli give us solos of enchanting beauty, full of never banal melodies, for example in the title track, and in "Flores", dedicated to Luca Flores, a great pianist friend who passed away, in which the saxophonist, switching to tenor, pays his debt to the more melodic Coltrane. If you really have a heart of stone, and at this point haven't capitulated yet, don't worry, the delightful four minutes of "Rabo De Nube" will take care of it. Prepare the tissue papers...

The defeat of the tough ones. A precious album, marked by an elegant, refined accessibility, recommended to anyone who wants to immerse themselves in an ethereal and dreamy acoustic dimension. Some strictly orthodox jazz enthusiasts might find it a bit "all'acqua di rose", although the excellent duet end of Cantini-Marcotulli, "In Your Own Sweet Way" (by Dave Brubeck) says a lot about the technical skills of our...

Finally, an album to understand the path taken by some musicians today in Italy, who start from a jazz training to give life to "total" music, trying to embrace as many languages as possible, even at the cost of losing some pieces along the way. Without ever giving up a lightness and a singability born from the Italian musical tradition.