| Sign up for our Email Newsletter & Subscriber Only Specials
|
|
|
We Did It, We Did It
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Italian drummer Tononi’s huge (and hugely ambitious) salute to saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk is the mother of all tribute albums. With four hours of music on three CDs and an international cast of more than 15 musicians, it covers 19 Kirk tunes and just as many by Tononi – as well as compositions by Ellington, Mingus, Hendrix, Bechet, and others associated with the late, great blind reed player.
Tononi presents this vast program in six medleys of Kirk’s tunes and his originals, interspersed with five sections of others’ music. Remarkably, Tononi cooks up something fresh to do with every tune, then takes a step further and thinks about the tune’s place in relationship to the others on the disc. This results in a bold piece of musical architecture with surprises around every corner and startling details in every room.
He takes “Remember Rockefeller at Attica” as a ballad, plays Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” as reggae, and pulls Kirk’s own “Rip Rag and Panic” in and out of tempo while interspersing a flute duo and a clarinet trio. His sense of narrative flow and big-hearted eclecticism make the Kirk/Tononi medleys organically unified and somewhat surreal suites. For instance, Part III, Ar(Rah)iving Soon opens with turntables and sampling that segues into a free-jazz blowout. Then Kirk’s driving “Pedal Up” materializes from the din, swings hard, explodes into free energy, and subsides into Tononi’s “Chamber Music,” a painterly piece featuring pointillistic dabs of color and texture. Instrumental commentary interrupts a tape of Kirk’s “Clickety Clack” monologue before the band wraps things up with a gently swinging “Serenade to a Cuckoo.”
In addition to Tononi’s delightful arranging, American trumpeter Herb Robertson, Italian reed player Gianluigi Trovesi, and longtime Tononi associates like trombonist Beppe Caruso, tenor saxophonist Daniele Cavallanti, and alto saxophonist Achille Succi. all solo memorably. This is a funny, confrontational, go-for-broke, idiosyncratic, and seriously entertaining tribute worthy of its subject.
— Ed Hazell (Jazziz Magazine)
This title is a special order. Please allow 10 days for processing. For
further
details, please click here. |
ARTISTS
Tiziano Tononi (drums, percussion); Herb Robertson (trumpet); Achille Succi (bass clarinet); Renato Geremia (violin, soprano sax); Gianluigi Trovesi (clarinets, alto sax); Riccardo Luppi (reeds); Beppe Caruso (trombone); Michel Godard (tuba); Alberto Tacchini (piano); Roberto Cecchetto (electric guitar); Tito Mangialajo, Pietro Leveratto (double bass); Victor Beard, Roberta Parsi (voice); Andrea Rainoldi (sampler, electronics) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Shopping Cart
