Jazzin' Europe

02/09/2025

Marco Colonna: the clarinet as oracle, the breath as living archive
In the ever-shifting, polyphonic theatre of contemporary European jazz, few figures embody the clarinet’s Janus-faced destiny, its nostalgic pull toward early New Orleans and its fierce propulsion into the fractured avant-garde, more completely than Marco Colonna. To speak of him is to invoke the clarinet not as instrument but as interlocutor, a reed-bound oracle whose utterances oscillate between the prayerful and the profane.
Colonna’s art emerges precisely at the fissure between history and invention. The clarinet, that slippery voice of the early 20th century, conjures at once the klezmer lament, the Parisian musette, Benny Goodman’s swing-time suavities, Dolphy’s ecstatic skirmishes. Yet in Colonna’s hands it becomes a palimpsest inscribed anew: the ghost of Sidney Bechet dissolves into Messiaen’s birdsong, the memory of Jimmy Giuffre’s hushed lyricism mutates into textures that recall the electronic shatterings of Stockhausen.
Listening to Colonna is to traverse a gallery of echoes: not a retrospective museum but a resonant archive, in which fragments of the past collide with the urgencies of the present. He approaches improvisation not as decoration but as inquiry, a Socratic dialogue with silence. Indeed, his silences are as articulate as his notes: he knows, like Miles Davis, that “the real music is in the spaces between.”
Historically, the clarinet has often been relegated to the periphery of modern jazz, eclipsed by the saxophone’s heroic roar or the trumpet’s regal authority. Colonna has reasserted its sovereignty, not by claiming a throne but by exploding the very notion of hierarchy. His clarinet whispers, barks, sobs, ricochets. It is both street-cry and philosophical tract, a paradoxical fusion of marketplace and monastery.
A crucial part of Colonna’s project lies in his tireless exploration of collective improvisation. Here, his Italian heritage asserts itself with luminous force. The polyphonic traditions of the peninsula, from the madrigals of Gesualdo to the street bands of southern processions, are never far from his timbre. One hears, in his phrasing, the simultaneity of voices that Umberto Eco called the opera aperta: music as open work, endlessly reinterpreted, never complete.
And yet Colonna is no antiquarian. His collaborations with improvisers across Europe bear the mark of a radical contemporaneity: his clarinet functions as antenna, registering the fractures of a Europe in crisis, the noise of migration, the unresolved chords of globalization. To hear him live is to hear a newspaper turned into vibration: politics translated into multiphonics, the refugee crisis refracted through trills and squeals, ecological collapse lamented in a low chalumeau register. If Brecht insisted that art must not decorate the world but change it, Colonna takes the dictum literally, and sonically.
There is also in his playing an ethical stance. Each note seems to insist upon the dignity of fragility: a reminder that breath itself, this most ephemeral of human actions, can be transformed into something both resistant and radiant. “The clarinet,” Colonna once remarked, “is my way of breathing in the world.” In that sentence lies his credo: music as respiration, history as inhalation, performance as exhalation.
In literary terms, one might compare Colonna’s art to the labyrinthine prose of Carlo Emilio Gadda, where syntax folds in upon itself, proliferating in digressions, catalogues, excesses. Like Gadda, Colonna resists the tyranny of linearity: his solos are not narratives with a beginning and end, but labyrinths where one loses and finds oneself repeatedly. Or perhaps, to invoke another lineage, he is closer to Joyce’s Work in Progress: language stretched to its limits, polyglot, centrifugal, inexhaustible.
And still, beyond all metaphor, there is the sheer sensuality of sound. The clarinet’s woody warmth, under his fingers, becomes corporeal: one hears saliva, friction, breath, the muscularity of the diaphragm. This physicality roots his work in the body, resisting the digital abstraction of so much contemporary culture. His music is not about the body—it is the body, vibrating, stammering, persisting.
Marco Colonna, then, stands as one of the indispensable voices of European improvisation today. He neither repeats the American canon nor denies it; he neither venerates tradition nor discards it. Instead, he treats tradition as compost, rich, pungent, fertile soil from which new shoots erupt, unpredictable yet necessary.
In the clarinet, that most ambivalent of instruments, at once archaic and modern, he has found his weapon, his diary, his confessional. To hear him is to witness breath becoming resistance, wood and reed becoming testimony. And when future historians chart the course of European jazz in the early twenty-first century, they may well describe Marco Colonna not only as a clarinetist of astonishing scope, but as a cartographer of sound’s moral terrain.

02/09/2025

Danilo Gallo: the double bass as a prehistoric oak

Danilo Gallo, double bassist, composer, perhaps jazzman, perhaps merely conspirator against categories, sometime chauffeur, sometime cook, occasional payer of coffees (to me), is far too large, too protean, to be contained by such skeletal definitions. To name him is already to misname him. He has made of suspicion toward labels his guiding compass, or rather his inverted magnet, repelling every attempt to shelve him: jazz, avant-garde, rock, free improvisation. He dismantles the cabinet of genres and burns it for kindling.
Like Po***ck, that American shaman of dripped, splattered, cataracted canvases, Gallo does not play the bass in the canonical sense of producing clearly contoured notes. He drips, smears, scars the air with it. He lets sound ooze, he scratches, he slaps the wood, he allows the squeak of fingertip sliding on string to become music, makes harmony and dissonance cohabit like quarrelling brothers condemned to share the same bed. Po***ck’s dripping was radical democracy of gesture: every drip equal to a brushstroke, every accident sacred, hierarchy dissolved. Gallo achieves the same with the double bass: what matters is not the figurative result—no pastoral scene, no idealized portrait—but the energetic field released by the gesture, the storm that trembles in the room after the note has fallen like an oil-drop on the kitchen tiles, ineradicable.
“Fear not chaos, for chaos finds its own form.” That Po***ckian credo is where Gallo dives, headlong, as into a vat of acrylic paint, willing to stain hands, strings, and listeners’ ears rather than submit to the antiseptic tyranny of the clean.
If John Fante urged us to ask the dust, Gallo inverts the injunction, transposes it downward, and compels us to ask the strings. Not the Los Angeles desert dust, but the grumble of gut, the metallic thrum, the wood spitting harmonics like pomegranate seeds. Imagine an impossible novel titled Ask the Strings: where truth is hidden between two low notes grinding against one another, fibrous, resonant, corporeal.

His curiosity is omnivorous, but not the pinned-butterfly curiosity of the collector, alphabetized and embalmed. Rather it is the Pantagruelian curiosity of the diner who tastes, chews, digests, and regurgitates in new form: rock, folk, melodies reeking of Eastern Europe, free jazz, dixieland, cool jazz, crooked ballads. Never for ornament, never for the empty badge of eclecticism, but out of necessity: sound must find multiple exits, must open like a city whose streets never terminate.

Here W. H. Auden, moralist disguised as ironist, sidles in: “Truth, like love and sleep, resists those who seek it too anxiously.” Is this not the marrow of Gallo’s art? Not to hunt truth with the neurotic impatience of the scholar, but to let it seep from the wood as unavoidable secretion, like the headache that follows too much white wine: not searched for, not desired, yet throbbing, inescapable.
Genres, in his hands, are mocked into irrelevance: no customs, no stamps, no checkpoints. Or, rather, each time a customs officer appears, Gallo answers with a bass-string snap that serves as passport, seal, refusal: jazz, yes, but also no; rock, certainly, but also boh. Melody permitted, but mutilated, broken, stitched back together. It is music of false passports, of multiple identities, of masks. His art is an open field, an arena where coexist the babble of provincial markets and the lunar silence of the concert hall, the obsessive groove that forces your head to nod and the rarefied abstraction that nails you immobile.
Po***ck with a bow, Fante with pizzicati, Auden with his sidelong smile: an improbable triad, yet necessary.
So who is Danilo Gallo? A musician who refuses the genre game, who does not court truth but finds it plastered on his own skin, who asks not dust but strings, who does not respect the taxonomy of the shelves but sets fire to them. An artist who, as Gadda would have had it, “in confusion, in baroque density, in tangled skein, discovers his purest clarity.” I have said it myself, for Gadda is dead.

9 track album

02/09/2025

Emanuele Cisi: A tenor voice between the ruins of history and the persistence of beauty
In the shifting pantheon of European jazz, where the shadows of American giants still loom like benevolent but inexorable gods, Emanuele Cisi has carved for himself a position both precarious and enduring, akin to the architectural survival of a Roman arch amidst the traffic of a modern piazza. A tenor saxophonist of rare timbral integrity, his voice—full-bodied yet capable of sudden chiaroscuro delicacy—resonates not as imitation, but as continuation: a voice that acknowledges the lineage of Coltrane, Rollins, Dexter Gordon, yet transfigures them into a distinctly Mediterranean sensibility, where melancholy, luminosity, and eros converge.
Cisi’s playing is never merely about notes or scales; it is about stance, ethos, almost a philosophy of breath. As Roland Barthes once said of music, “It is the breath which makes sense of the body.” Cisi’s breath, the pressurized stream of air that passes through reed and bore, carries with it echoes of Turin’s industrial twilight, of Italian piazzas where the murmur of fountains collides with the memory of operatic cadences, of an Italy that has always oscillated between the baroque and the minimalist, the monumental and the intimate.
His 2018 Blue Note release No Eyes, dedicated to the legendary Lester Young, stands as a testimony to both scholarship and invention. To listen is to perceive a palimpsest: Lester’s ethereal melancholy is there, certainly, but refracted through the prism of European intellectual modernity, much as Thomas Mann refracted Wagner in Doktor Faustus. Cisi does not play Lester’s “sound” as an archivist; he interrogates it, re-animates it, letting it breathe against the contemporary tension of silence, rhythm, and harmonic expansion.
Historically, the Italian jazz tradition has been both blessed and cursed. Blessed, because Italy’s deep operatic and lyrical heritage makes for a natural marriage with the improvisational spirit—think of Enrico Rava’s trumpet, Stefano Bollani’s mercurial piano, Paolo Fresu’s radiant lyricism. Cursed, because Italian jazz has often been relegated to a provincial appendage of American innovation. Cisi’s achievement is to stand at the fault line of these two conditions, turning the supposed provincialism into a source of originality. His tenor saxophone sings in long, arching phrases that recall not only Sonny Rollins’s muscularity but also the bel canto legacies of Bellini and Donizetti.
It is no coincidence that Cisi often cites influences that extend beyond the jazz canon. His phrasing contains something of the architectural clarity of Palladio, the tension of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, the humanistic warmth of Italo Calvino’s prose. When Cisi performs, one feels that the music is not being “made” but rather revealed, as if the saxophone were a torchlight scanning the frescoes of a ruined cloister at dusk.
And then there is rhythm. Art Taylor once insisted that jazz rhythm was a mode of freedom, and Cisi has absorbed that lesson profoundly. His collaborations—whether with American counterparts such as Joe Locke or Italian stalwarts like Andrea Pozza—always exhibit a rhythmic elasticity, a capacity to stretch and compress time, that calls to mind Stravinsky’s dictum: “Rhythm is the most primitive and most sophisticated thing in music.” Cisi, too, seems to believe in rhythm as ontology: not merely a beat, but a mode of being.
Cisi’s legacy, still very much in the making, may ultimately be understood as a work of translation. He translates American jazz into Italian poetics, Italian poetics into the universal idiom of improvisation, and improvisation into an ethical stance: that of dialogue, risk, vulnerability. In an era when music is often reduced to digital ephemera, his tenor voice insists on the corporeality of sound, on the fact that music is, at its deepest, a human body wrestling with air.
IDEP