Postcards – Under the Mole – Pianists: The atmosphere of the Turin concert: Videos, Photos

This is now the third time I have come to Turin for the Festival directed by Stefano Zenni, and this already says a lot about what I think.

The climate of the city is practically summer, not only for the heat and the sun, but also for the half-deserted streets of the historic center, dotted with closed shutters.

Conservatorio Verdi, concert hall: very fine acoustics

But you only have to cross the door of the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory to find yourself in a splendid hall packed with an audience that is perhaps the best resource of this festival: a little old-fashioned bourgeois and a little hipster, a little experienced and a little young, however cultured and not occasional.

On the warm evening of April 25, Vijay Iyer takes the stage. It is a rare opportunity to listen to him solo: proof of the preciousness of the occasion comes from the fact that I was unable to find for you a YouTube clip documenting a recent solo performance by the pianist, and unfortunately it is not easy to make up for this with makeshift solutions.

… and then let’s go for arbitrary similarities. The disturbing ‘divination’ of the unforgettable ‘Uneasy’ somehow suggests the atmosphere of the Turin concert

As the four readers of the blog well know, I consider Vijay the spearhead of contemporary jazz piano, and I never miss an opportunity to listen to him live, in an ‘unfiltered’ version, quite different from the one that emerges from his very notable albums.

Every meeting with him is a sort of ‘blind date’, a blind date, also because our man’s music is a barometer that is very sensitive to the spirit of the times.

And in the Turin evening the hand does not indicate beauty, quite the opposite. In a very long and dense set, several medleys unfolded in which the themes of the pianist’s now substantial book were reshaped and I would almost say radically distorted.

We start almost quietly, in a meditative and introverted atmosphere. A clear and decisive left hand digs into very dark and gloomy spaces: it is a rather tormented Vijay, who instead of contemplating the open horizons of the past anxiously scrutinizes the looming storm clouds.

As the set progresses, the volume and consistency of the music gradually expand, until reaching at certain moments truly impressive climaxes.

Once again, Vijay’s talent for a fluid instant composition shines, which knows moments of transition from one episode to another well signaled to the listener with massive and I would almost say sharp blocks of chords.

Aficionados are left stunned by the anxiety and tension that transfigures so many of Iyer’s classics that we have come to know from ‘Uneasy’ and ‘Compassion’: not even that sort of hymn to the rebirth of the pandemic era – at least that’s how we heard it – that is ‘Night and Day’ in Joe Henderson’s arrangement, one of the peaks of ‘Uneasy’, escapes.

This very dense concert, full of harshness and a sense of threat, ended in a rather singular and surprising way.

Vijay briefly addresses the audience, mentions the ‘special day for your country’, adds some allusions to the situation in his country, but alas he doesn’t use the microphone which remains idle on the piano and the very accurate acoustics of the room are unfortunately very absorbent.

Vijay’s hands rest on the keyboard again to intertwine the alienated lines of a Beatles theme with Inti Illimani’s “Pueblo unido…”, the last surprise reserved for a concentrated and absorbed audience that finally calls Iyer back on stage at least four times with an intense ovation.

And in the end he is dismissed with a barely hinted kiss: for a former Yale physicist, that seems like a lot to me.

John Lewis, a true jazz master thinker

The following evening in the same room the atmosphere was completely different, a testament to the wide range of TJF’s offerings.

The stage that had seen Iyer’s meditative solitude was now crowded with Enrico Pieranunzi’s trio (Luca Bulgarelli on bass, Mauro Beggio on drums) and the Orchestra Filarmonica Italiana led by Michele Corcella, a chamber ensemble that lines up five strings and as many wind instruments.

In short, once again the risky gamble of reconciling a jazz formation with an ensemble with a strong European-academic matrix is ​​attempted.

The players who now sit at the table where almost all the others have also lost their shirts can count on two aces up their sleeves: the first is the musical personality of Pieranunzi, son of an artist and perhaps the most academically equipped in the unrepeatable generation of our ‘wild jazz players’ who grew up physically elbow to elbow with the last greats of jazz.

The second is the blessing of the concert’s dedicatee, John Lewis, eminence grise of the Modern Jazz Quartet (and of other things, too).

Modern Jazz Quartet ‘Milano’, 1953. We have also heard it from Pieranunzi and Corcella

A beautiful and cultured choice by Pieranunzi, who thus shakes off the banal and well-known comparison with Bill Evans. Not a little demanding, however: the esprit de finesse of Lewis in ‘Vendome’, ‘Concorde’, ‘Milano’, ‘No Sun in Venice’ is already a difficult goal to achieve, especially for a European chamber music group; on this side of the Atlantic we do not have the example of a Kronos Quartet or an Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and even less so of the magnificent ensembles manipulated in the studio by Gunther Schuller.

The risk that chamber musicians are reduced to the role of accompanist or mere suppliers of backgrounds or atmospheres is there and is strong.

Let us add that Pieranunzi does not give discounts: from his piano come subtlety and richness of nuances, but also a swing of snappy and feline agility. And here Corcella’s arrangements come to the rescue, which, strong in a jazz background, allow the Orchestra to dialogue on an equal footing and with ease with the trio; pity only for the wind line a little in the background.

In a situation like this the role of the drums is critical, problematic hinge between the two groups: and here a special mention goes to the subtle and sensitive drumming of Beggio, who worked the miracle of saving the nervous restlessness of Lewis’s pages without taking away space from the companions of the Philharmonic.

‘Venice’ 1959. John Lewis with three-quarters of the MJQ. A premonition of Milt Jackson’s escape in 1974? In any case, a nice demonstration of the subdued restlessness we were talking about..

After all, when we talk about the Modern Jazz Quartet, perhaps we think too much about the impeccable tuxedos flaunted in the most famous European concert halls, and much less about the tensions and lacerations that accompanied the entire life of the group since the beginning (think of the immediate defection of Kenny Clarke, the 1974 breakup caused by the restless Milt Jackson and the final reunion in 1981).

Not to mention the irrepressible blues tinge that characterized the music of the four: and if we want to nitpick, this is perhaps the only thing that has faded in the refined reading of Pieranunzi & Corcella.

“Monday in Milan”, from “A Milanese Story”, John Lewis 1962. A blues for a nervous and creatively restless Milan that no longer exists. We can only remember it in the frames of films such as ‘Una Storia Milanese’ by Eriprando Visconti (grandson of Luchino, let’s not forget)

The smooth flow of the evening is also due to the concise didactic discussions with which Pieranunzi guided the audience with a nonchalance and understatement often seasoned with his subtle irony, a rare commodity on our stages.

In the final stages of the concert the pianist reserved exclusive spaces for his trio and also for his piano, without failing to perform the inevitable, famous ‘Django’, an elegy in memory of the manouche guitarist, the first true European jazzman.

“Variation on a theme by John Lewis (Django)”, Jazz Abstractions, 1961. And I, who am a contrarian, dish out this, not at all languid and sentimental. But this too is John Lewis (here however present more than anything else in spirit, not by chance the tutelary deity of a session that sees people like Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Gunther Schuller at work. The apogee of the Third Stream: others who have bet and won at the table mentioned above)

To complete the seduction of a sensitive and participating audience, a fascinating “Autumn in New York” arrived, offered as an encore: it is by Vernon Duke (a fake for a difficult Russian name, providentially suggested by George Gershwin, also a fake), but it has nothing to envy Lewis’s themes in terms of subtlety and refinement.

And to reward your patience, here is a clip of the concert, almost live from the TJF YouTube channel: with the contrapuntal ‘Vendome’ entrusted to the care of Pieranunzi & Corcella you can get a first-hand idea. For once.

By Bob Miltonson