Stefano di Battista
Parker's Mood

THE REVIEW

"I always lived in a kind of state of panic, I had to sleep in garages.
I was completely disoriented.
The worst thing was that no one understood my music."
Charles "Bird" Parker

Release year: 2005 - Fiftieth anniversary of Bird's death
Record label: Blue Note

What happens if a great jazz saxophonist like Stefano di Battista decides to pay tribute to the founder of bebop, as well as the greatest expression of the genre, Charlie Parker? Simply, it results in a record of the highest level, "Parker's Mood", a record that sounds damn "live" and "black", as you would hardly expect from the work of a white musician in a recording room of the Officine Meccaniche in Milan. A work of sweat, bad smells, and cigars lit in the rehearsal room, of green walls and brown instruments. Elegant yet simultaneously "wild", characterized by a sound difficult to evoke in words.

This is not a record of simple revisitations or reinterpretations of the tracks, rather it is a form of impromptu, yet impossible live jam session between the band put together by Di Battista, which includes names of absolute prestige such as Herlin Riley, Kevin Barron (who in the past has already collaborated with sacred monsters like Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie), Rosario Bonaccorso, and Flavio Boltro (in yet another collaboration), and Parker himself. It's an ongoing dialogue of notes, a lively exchange of opinions between distant extensions, improvisations dictated by genius. It's unstable, beautiful, tense, and vibrant. It seems to have no continuity, modal. It's jazz. Blues.

Everything smells.
Sometimes of dirt.
It's annoyingly pleasant. 

A difficult bet, that of Stefano di Battista. To navigate through some of the notes of Parker's immense natural talent, in improvisation without rules, sometimes very fast sometimes still, a sound that burns the skin, is a fascinating but risky challenge, too much to be faced without that demon that burns inside you and dictates the times without the expected, studied schemes. In "Night in Tunisia" there is all of this. In "Confirmation", the crazy dialogues between trumpet and sax. "Embraceable You" is the truce of madness.

Imitating Bird Parker is impossible.
Playing alongside him is a commitment that has made genius wrists tremble.
Every comparison is a battle lost from the start. But Stefano di Battista plays with humility.