Paris Blues

"If you're looking for an authentic Jazz album with great tunes interpreted with warmth and emotion, there is no need to bother with any imitator. Fonè Jazz has the answer. Paris Blues features 11 songs played with "respectful intensity" (their words) by Riccardo Zegna (piano) and Giampaolo Casati (trumpet, Cornet, flugelhorn). This is a consolidated partnership developed through years of concerts and now this new project in the recording studio.

The result is a collection of hot and voluptuous melodies, fleshed out with great taste. The tracks feature compositions by Duke Ellington, but also by Dizzy Gillespie, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.

For nearly an hour we hear music through the lenses of the masters. The title song, from the soundtrack of the film of 1961, is a ballad of great charm, with blues accents which emerge here and there. Reflections In D, an Ellington masterpiece from The Duke Plays Ellington (1953), performed in the past even by Bill Evans, confirms all his extraordinary modernity made of suspended chords that create an atmosphere of unexpected disenchantment. The many influences and nuances of the great composer, arranger and bandleader are all there and are traced to the heart of the project, which emphasizes especially the intensity of the melodies and themes more than the refinement of solos. It is also felt in two standards: Ishafan, a dreamy exoticism and Just Squeeze Me, a tribute to the jazzy and southern atmosphere and style of Louis Armstrong, one of the instigators of Casati's music. It is interesting to also hear the two pieces by Gillespie. The edgy theme of Be Bop, a song that gave the definitive label to a music revolution, is slowed and deepened into a doleful singing blues. With Alma, from the Afro-Cuban period of Gillespie, is stripped of its cumbersome apparatus rhythmic and reveals a gentle introspective dimension.

The album attracts attention without the fireworks of instrumental techniques. It offers a relaxed performance of standards. No easy task, especially in the chaos of the current world of music. But dodging prejudices and hasty conclusions, Paris Blues turns into anything but a foregone conclusion, packed with great elegance, rich in nuances that turn out to listen after listen. The result is exceptional sound and performances."