CD диск Rolff, Massimiliano - Adventures On Magia 1CD (0608917355628)

The critical truth of life, for some musicians, is the granitic coherence with style; a musical habitat shared with musicians with identical passions, which guarantees perfect mastery of one’s expressive means, fluency and an ability to build, mimetically, new themes that follow in the footsteps of those who have marked the path of that aesthetic. On the other hand, other musicians feel an urgent need, as the years of life and career unfold, to expand their comfort zone so as to face still significant risks for themselves and new adventures for those who want to listen.

Massimiliano Rolff belongs to this second category of musicians. Many sound practices (well rooted in Afro-American aesthetics, but with a wider ambit than that) inhabit the composer bassist’s head, heart and fingers; a shimmering pool of possibilities that occasionally spark inventive ideas in his path. You can appreciate Rolff as the solid, pragmatic, hard-bop bassist with impeccable intonation and an excellent feel for swing. On the other hand, you might happen to see him playing an electric bass chasing the thickening of Pastorius-style sixteenth notes with a jazz-funk group. Finally, you might savour his uncommon talent for investigating the most reclusive harmonic folds in Gershwin’s magnificent sound epiphanies. One way or another, you will know that here, in this recording, the musical air you’re breathing is quite different.

Here, the practice of Latin jazz returns (strengthened and refined), a practice that has been maturing in the musician’s spirit for a long time and that has already left traces in recent recordings. For some musicians, however, the return here is a happy one. Jazz is not a solitary flower: it is a bunch of uncut flowers with small but solid roots, in nourishing soil, that have consistently produced an iridescent sparkle. The colours of jazz accentuate darting melodic profiles derived from the Gaelic heritage, notes that tend towards the one immediately above or bend to caress the one immediately below, resulting from an African, or perhaps Afro-Mediterranean, flexible attitude, and more. The many Latin cultures which - through State colonial robbery or individual survival, found themselves in Latin America, the Caribbean and North America – ended up in confrontation with all other cultures.