Man, this is great! To the extent that I laughed out loud from the sheer pleasure of listening to these guy's having fun with music. Free, intense, rhythmic, funky, wild at times, subdued at others (though rarely). The band consists of Gianni Gebbia on sax, Rosario Paci on trumpet and Francesco Cusa on drums, all three from Sicily and all three excellent musicians. The tracks are short and compact, there are no long blowing sessions, but focused, concise little work-outs, often with a kind of melodic theme and some pre-conceived structural component, and the rest is wild and joyful interaction. This is music as intense, fresh, muscular and direct as it gets. Don't miss it.This release is not new, but it's been made available again on CDBaby, also in download version.
So, listen and download/buy from CDBaby.
I couldn't find any other records by this band, so if anyone knows more about their releases, suggestions are more than welcome.
© stef
4 comments:
This combo doesn't exist anymore but two of its members are part of another trio, Switters, whose latest album is titled "Current Trends In The Contemporary Italian Music Disaster" (2008).
Their page on My Space:
http://www.myspace.com/switterstrio
The liner notes of the album were written by Wu Ming 1 of the Wu Ming collective of novelists, and the author also reads them aloud (in Italian, and quite spiritedly) in the first track of the album. Here's the English translation:
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KOLIKO KOSTA TALIANSKI GIEZZ?
Who are these Switters that dare describe as a "disaster" the state of music in Italy, and especially the state of jazz and the likes? Jazz - or, as Italians pronounce it, jetz - has taken over, jetz is everywhere, they teach it in music schools, there are jetz festivals in all towns from January to December, and the Beautiful Country is churning out young sophisticated talents that are very successful in clubs and theaters all over the world. What "disaster" are these guys talking about? I answer on my own behalf, as I've renounced the mandate to speak on behalf of the band. They answer by playing their music, and I play my instrument too, and my instrument is language. "Disaster" because it couldn't be otherwise, because the whole country is a disaster and there can be no "happy island", not in the middle of an oily sea with a plundered sea-floor, where you can see filthy mutant mussel-beds and rotting seagulls floating by. Art reflects and re-elaborates and re-vomits the world around it, and if it doesn't, then it's just a fraud, it's phishing for gullible folks, a rip-off like those Argentine bonds were. Riots flare up everywhere, the stench of shit has reached the exosphere, and yet today's successful jetz acts sound like commercials for holiday villages. Jetz is light and smooth, it's soft and low-salt, an enervating, new-agey, consoling, lullaby-like plink-plunk-plink for weaklings, a gym session for politicians with the hobby of writing books, a launching ramp for carreers in bogus political parties. On the other hand, jetz is lifeless virtuosism, a freak-show of infant prodigies (i.e. infantile prodigies) or a convention of zombies in a geriatric ward, people who had nothing to say twenty years ago and now are completely void of anything except for their own arrogance. In any case: no vigor, no nerve, no hard dicks hitting like battering rams the doors of academia (or reality). A nation like ours, with its gorey crime news and its social fabric soaked in pus, deserves a music that's tense, uncomfortable and obscene, a music that implacably opposes clichés and cracks heads like those sticks in zen stories, the ones brandished by masters beating satori out of disciples. In plain words, a music that's educational and pol-potistic in a good sense (!), a music that threatens at gun point those robot-like jetz geeks and forces them to wear dunce caps and shut the fuck up, and if they say one word they get kicks in the butt, haute école pedagogique! Art must practice the paradox, and imagine the world upside down. Again, who are these Switters? They're shitheads, they're killjoys and ball-busters. They're unblocking the sink and unclogging the tubes of Italian jazz. They're like those small bags you throw into the WC to clean the septic tank. They're people who settle their scores. They're what it takes, and I'm what it takes too, and there's no word in these notes that's not indispensabile. The journey begins, for fuck's sake. Put your hands on your balls, and off we go!
Wu Ming 1, January 2008
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You can listen this verty track here:
http://www.wumingfoundation.com/suoni/suoni.html#giezz
Ciao,
Jazzofilo, from Italy
GREAT! I knew of Switters, but it's great to read the Wu Ming text in English. Thanks for the translation.
REFRESHING!!
INSPIRING!!
... of we go!
... but it's also really too bad that Trionacria only released one album...
Stef,
Don't know if you still check posts on an old thread like this but I just bought this CD. Great music for my taste. Thanks for bringing it up.
Nick S.
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