Venegoni & Co
Sarabanda

Venegoni & Co - Sarabanda, 1979

The Milanese multi-instrumentalist Gigi Venegoni began his career as a guitarist within Arti e Mestieri, where, with his fluid and precise style, he contributed significantly to giving Beppe Crovella's band a decidedly international feel. When the trajectory of the parent group began to descend, during that well-known period of the late '70s when Italian progressive rock was unraveling like an old wool sweater, Venegoni had the brilliant courage to promote his own music in a musical world now dominated by the tides of commercial backflow. So, while the falsettos of the Bee Gees and Sylvester raged on the radio from one side and the remnants of a punk with a destiny already marked from the other, Venegoni with his progressive jazz rock band decided to continue, with innate and perhaps reckless consistency, a serious and far from commercial venture. Fortunately, an Italian label at the time was very attentive to certain realities: Gianni Sassi’s Cramps Record, which published Sarabanda without hesitation.

The album features three tracks on the first side (speaking, of course, of the LP) and the eponymous long suite on the second. Everything is permeated by an exciting Mediterranean atmosphere, spiced with flavors that only certain instrumental mixtures can provide: acoustic guitars with violins and traditional percussion, handclapping and jew's harps, to ensure that jazz rock, combined with folklore and tradition becomes a lively atmospheric attitude, rather than a cold and calculated means of onanistic elegy.

Everything flows well, from the initial "Mediterraneo" with its overwhelming movement of guitars and violins. In "Opa" and "Balon", one can savor the atmosphere of an Arab bazaar, a North African souq among rounded voices, whistles, and percussion that invite the frenzied movement of the tarantella in a nighttime, yet sunny, evocation of beach fires and propitiatory rites of a time that will no longer belong to us.

The band is extraordinarily cohesive, and, with Gigi Venegoni's guitars, the masterful keyboard and piano parts of the great Ludovico Einaudi, they roll over complex rhythms, rendered fascinating by the light, precise, and engaging touch of the very talented and much-missed Beppe Sciuto.

It’s inevitable to appreciate the studio work and continuous rehearsals and arrangements of the group, work that lasted two years, which at the time was really a lot, especially if spent in such a dense and effective manner, as in our case.

The suite "Sarabanda" gathers everything beautiful and interesting that progressive jazz rock has contributed to Italian music of the '70s, recalling essential teachings and directions from Perigeo, Arti e Mestieri, Area, etc. Few episodes in that whole panorama have managed to summarize and condense so well an atmosphere and a sound style that would then result in certain forms of current world music. A beautiful, current, and fundamental album. 

sioulette