CD review: Jasper Somsen, Enrico Pieranunzi, Gabriele Mirabassi – Traveller’s Ways – 2024: Video, CD cover

A melody you never heard before takes you back to a place where you have never been. Immediately, from the first notes of Traveller’s Ways, you as the listener feel that wondrous combination of familiarity and astonishment.

On this magnificent album, Somsen, Pieranunzi and Mirabassi create music that feels like coming home and at the same time leads to numerous unknown destinations you have never visited before.

All the eleven works deal with travel, but often with the mental side of it, the mindset. This is exemplified by one of the compositions being called ‘Free Spirit’. The analogy between travel and playing music cannot be missed. Every track is a journey as such. Somsen, Pieranunzi and Mirabassi travel light, with their technique and each other as their only luggage. They travel without a map, finding their way by listening rather than by thinking about a possible end goal. They just want to be on the road and once their travel has started they are paying attention as closely as they can, happy to look at the beautiful objects that can be found at the roadside, and now and then standing still to enjoy the view.

I often dream of a large, white house in a faraway, unknown land. It stands at a crossroads and the house is brightly lit. For sure I know I have never been there before and yet this dream in some way brings me home. I have the same experience while listening to Traveller’s Ways a wonderful album on which three men wander peacefully and on which every note is a precious gem, a beautiful stone that is picked up for just a moment and examined carefully. Meanwhile a lot of ground is being covered, and you, the listener, arrive at unknown places along with the musicians. Places they did not know either, but where they arrive because of their mutual trust. Every work is like a dream, and in dreams you cannot get lost. You arrive somewhere every time.

1 The Road Less Traveled (5:32)
2 Twin Flames (2:44)
3 A New Dawn (3:57)
4 Jigsaw (3:26)
5 Still Waters Run Deep (4:43)
6 Crossroads (3:43)
7 Leap of Faith (5:05)
8 Traveller’s Tale (2:15)
9 Resonance from the Past (4:52)
10 Free Spirit (4:34)
11 Mysterious Ways (2:37)

Enrico Pieranunzi (piano)
Jasper Somsen (double bass)
Gabriele Mirabassi (clarinet)