Egea: Like Music For Chocolate
“Why should we copy the Americans?” The rhetorical question is Antonio Miscena’s standard answer to criticism of his banning the jazz drumkit from his recordings of Italy’s jazz elite for the curious Egea label he runs in the small medieval city of Perugia. It’s a question that belies both a deep knowledge of U.S. jazz traditions and the fervent pride, even chauvinism, of Europeans in creating their own. (Indeed, must it be labeled “jazz” or “fusion”? These are more than rhetorical questions.)
Mention that Egea has been likened to Italy’s version of ECM – the Munich label whose ascetic sound has for 30 years helped define Europe’s approach to jazz and new music, garnering a mystique among fans and critics – and Miscena smiles cat-like, pooh-poohing the idea but clearly pleased with the comparison. No, he will tell you, ECM’s ambience is found in the spatial relationship of instruments to the studio, while Egea stresses the inner sounds of the instruments themselves. Egea’s sound, according to one musician, “distances ourselves from oversimplified ‘folk music,’ trendy ‘new age,’ and various imported elements.” This seamless blend of chamber music, improvisation, and Mediterranean folk forms seems to emanate from the imagined evanescence of another world. Perhaps it does. Much of this music was recorded in centuries-old theatres once owned by the nobility around Perugia, the capital of Italy’s breadbasket region of Umbria. The area’s climate and geology have preserved the theatres beautifully, offering optimum “natural acoustics” that yield Egea’s trademark timbral warmth. That sound – a direct-to-microphone state of grace, really – would be shattered by a drumkit’s rambunctious splash, explains Miscena, a 46-year-old former microbiologist whose desk clutter is rife with reports and weighty volumes on the science of acoustics.
“Ridiculous,” retorts Enrico Rava, Italy’s most famous jazzman, on Egea’s anti-drumkit and -electric aesthetic. The trumpeter, who did his woodshedding in New York at the tail-end of the ‘60s avant-garde, adds with a shrug, “Why be so restrictive? I suppose you can call this part of Miscena’s vision.” Ironically, it was Rava’s agent who suggested a 1993 duet with Italy’s leading jazz pianist, Enrico Pieranunzi, that became Egea’s first official production (Nausicaa).
“Egea is like my little corner of the sky, where I feel completely free to look for beauty,” says Pieranunzi, 52, whose satin touch informs the classically-oriented solo piano music he records for the label. “Egea found an audience for this story-telling music that nobody thought was there. It existed at the borders – people who are not necessarily jazz fans, or jazz fans who aren’t fond of post-bop styles, as well as those who feel a deep resonance with folk roots, and classical music. It’s kind of mild, like speech that talks sweetly to you, but also rigorous.”
I first became acquainted with the world of Egea – referring to the Egeo sea off Greece, symbolizing pan-Mediterranean fertilization – at the 2001 Montreal International Jazz Festival, where a dozen or so of its musicians made the label’s first foray into North America. Conversations invariably turned to the value of local cultures in a corporately globalized world: Perugia, they assured me, was “quite magical,” out of time. Indeed, the Etruscan city’s violent past as a middle-ages trading center – with concomitant family rivalries and blood-sports (heart-pulling, stoning, poisonings, ad nauseam) – has given way to a leisurely life of chocolate, jazz and academia. Perugina – maker of Baci (Italian for “kisses”), the famed hazelnut enrobed in two chocolates and a corny saying – is headquartered here and ubiquitous everywhere in Italy, as is the Eurochocolate Festival each October. The Umbria Jazz Festival, founded in 1973 and surviving radical unrest that caused cancellations early on, is one of Europe’s most adventurous. Perugia is home to a large state university and also boasts the Universita per Stranieri (for foreigners), which Mussolini established in an effort to flex his credentials as a worldly man.
“Tonino” Miscena is small, salt-and-pepper haired, stylishly casual, intense. He sleeps no more than four hours a night, and has his hands all over Perugia’s culture industries. Weaned on twentieth century music (Ligetti was a favorite) during ten years at the conservatory, he also became interested in antique music (1000-1500) and began recording it in 1982 for a label he called Quadrivium. This is also the name of his boutique record shop, located at the foot of an eleventh century tower where he lives in an upstairs apartment. Egea’s offices are located down the winding dark gray and black cobblestoned via, next to his 16th century theater, Oratorio di Santa Cecilia, which he won the city tender to renovate and where he now records. Nearby, he also owns Perugia’s premier jazz club, Contrappunto, a hermetically-sealed room within a popular pub-style pizza parlor that wouldn’t look out of place on any U.S. campus.
Miscena’s musical vision – an inspired mixture of roots and unusual pan-Mediterranean instrumentation – is reflective of a desire among Europeans to mine local traditions to create something timeless, universal, even modern (much as Bartok and Stravinsky did a century ago, but on a more intimate chamber scale). It’s a movement that owes at least part of its growing appeal as a stand against the U.S. corporate-culture hegemony. “We’re researching a rich, poetic Italian folkloric heritage that just hasn’t been used very often, even in this country,’ says Miscena. “The south of Italy is really filled with Byzantine, Arab, Spanish, French, Balkan influences. Only the new generation of musicians are ready to use these influences.”
One of these is clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi, a lifelong Perugino who is Egea’s most-recorded musician (featured with Pieranunzi and bassist Marc Johnson on its top-selling album, the sunlit pastoral Racconti mediterranei). Mirabassi also travels widely as a core member of an ever-changing band led by oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil, one of the most popular exponents of the cross-cultural melting pot that characterizes new music in Europe today. (The “immigration question” on the continent creates ferment that cuts many ways; witness the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Front. The mongrelized music – with roots from folk to hip-hop, not “jazz” per se but jazzy enough – is a crowning jewel.)
Mirabassi’s large output for Egea includes jaunts into Brazilian chorro music and Italian folklore (with Come una volta), duets with modern classical guitar star Sergio Assad and accordionist Richard Galliano, and a folk-moderne project with French tuba giant (and Abou-Khalil bandmate) Michel Godard called Lo Stortino (“an Italian word that almost doesn’t exist, but which we understand as the opposite of straight”). His sound is like a wisp of smoke, out of thin air, with few sharp edges but oodles of mellifluous notes.
“Jazz is one of the most difficult words in the world to define,” says Mirabassi. “For me it’s an approach, rather than a specific type of music: jazz means to be a musical thief. For a European musician jazz demonstrates that it’s possible to make music in a very free way, mixed in your own personal melting pot – which, incidentally, is what happened at the beginning of the 20th century when jazz was born. Of course my point of view is necessarily very far away from the origins of jazz. It’s different for an American musician with a tradition to ‘carry on.’ The globalization phenomenon has changed the way we see tradition. Unlike musicians of earlier generations who grew up with strong unified local tradition, my own roots were” – in the mediated (wired and wireless) global village – “in a sense destroyed by communications technologies. I had to invent, recreate, choose a tradition for myself. This process can be complicated, perhaps uncomfortable for some. On the other hand, it’s an opportunity.”
Every bit the Euro-beat in horn-rimmed glasses and neatly trimmed dark hair brushed forward, Mirabassi is wiry, as animated by music as Martin Scorcese is with film. The large bay window in his woodsy home, 12 km. outside Perugia, opens into a salon stuffed with children’s toys, a piano, books, photos and, around the dinner table, two walls lined with CDs and records in alphabetized categories: jazz, classical, opera, contemporary, world music. Dominant is his collection of Ellington, “the composer of the 20th century, whatever genre of music,” says Mirabassi adamantly. He met his wife Francesca – petite, fair, rosy-cheeked – at the conservatory nearly twenty years ago, when she was a violin student; today she’s the house manager of the precious Santa Cecilia theatre.
“When you record in a natural acoustic, you must respect it, and think carefully about how you want to shape the music, almost like a classical composer,” says Mirabassi. “You need a combination of instruments that are naturally balanced. This is what chamber music is all about.” By contrast, he explains, each instrument in a jazz quartet has a more or less specific rhythmic or harmonic role. “Because Egea uses no mixing board, the position of the microphones means everything. This is knowledge that technicians 50 years ago mastered,” unlike today’s coldly automated, and expensive, studio set-ups. “We don’t have the money to compete in big-market technology, but we have incredibly rich historical resources. There’s no comparison between the quality of this acoustic and what you find elsewhere.” He laughs heartily at the irony. “Our theatres and churches are much more expensive! You can’t buy them!”
One reason Egea’s differing stylistic influences are so seamless, says Mirabassi, is that “chamber music has a discipline similar to jazz. Rule number one is interplay. You cannot be a good chamber music player if you do not listen to what’s going on around you. Well, that’s exactly what jazz is.”
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The desire to make a new kind of music – “jazzistica” in spirit but hardly American-styled – fuels the artistic successes of a growing number of independent-minded Euro labels. This is a natural outgrowth of the curious place of exile that jazz, never fully appreciated in America, enjoys on the continent. The jazz influx, starting as early as the 1920s, meant old and new worlds colliding and co-existing, occasionally as gently as Miles Davis falling in love with Juliette Greco on his first trip to Paris (April, 1949). Europeans absorbed expatriot icons, who periodically settled on the friendlier continent, in vivo: Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Kenny Clarke (the first clarinet, sax, and bop-drumming kings) and Chet Baker (the quintessential “cool” white ‘50s jazz icon). Often enough a lyric fly-by-night quality permeated the pick-up bands visiting Americans played with; the creative exchanges left an indelible mark on European musicians. The fruits are now ripe.
Consider Pieranunzi’s transformation – towards “European” classicism – backing Baker, considered washed-up in America but idolized in Italy, starting in 1979. “I had been under the sway of bebop, Charlie Parker then Bud Powell, but things changed when I met Chet. He was a master of giving melody its highest value. A song in his lips became a story. Playing with him was a shock for me: He opened me up to a new perspective, mostly in the melody and sensuality of his music.”
As the Euro club, concert and festival circuit became a lifeline for American musicians – “No Europe, no jazz,” succinctly said pianist Paul Bley – the rise of cross-genre European music led to the creation of new-thinking record labels. The model is still ECM, which not only launched the solo careers of such Americans as Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and Pat Metheny in the 1970s, but was immediately identifiable for its stark sound, “the next best sound to silence,” airily transcending musical boundaries. (Its founder, Manfred Eicher, recently won the Grammy – as best classical producer.) In addition to providing an escape from the clumsy tyranny of U.S. marketing pigeonholes, these labels document the astonishing aesthetic developments of three generations of European musicians. The Italian scene, in particular, is percolating.
Egea’s Miscena delights in, and denies, furtive rumors that ECM’s Eicher is monitoring his moves. The German company scored a critical hit in 2000 with In Cerca di Cibo, chronicling the sweetly adventurous gallops of clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi and 70-year-old accordion master Gianni Coscia, where tradition meets the avant-garde and what was once considered “old-fashioned” becomes revelatory. It was Egea that first recorded the duo in 1995’s Radici (or “Roots”). This music “accepted nostalgia, even certain traces of provincialism,” wrote critic Vittorio Franchini in the liner notes, “restoring it to our times with fresh language, often filled with ironies, acidulous sarcasm but also authentic passion, as if the two were unable to withdraw from those emotional situations that touched them as boys.” Although the warmer-sounding Radici went through ten printings in Italy, it took ECM’s In cerca, hyped with an essay by semiotics star Umberto Eco, to put them on the “world music” map. Eco recalls his first contact with “jazz,” as a provincial boy in the post-war years, was through Coscia’s playing in their hometown of Alessandria, near Milan. He hails “a new transversality where distinctions of genre are vanishing, while a certain attention is being paid (and this is something new) to Italian folk music.”
Coscia, and Egea, ups the ante with the recent L’Archiliuto, breathtaking fine-de-siecle pastiche – almost cut-and-paste a la John Zorn – triggered by deep warm memory. A tribute to Europe’s leading 1930s accordionist Gorni Kramer, who introduced jazz improvisation into Italian big bands, it pitches a small group – Trovesi’s swoons, smooth veteran trombonist Dino Piana (the first Italian improviser of note on that instrument), and Zappa-esque vibraphonist Andrea Dulbecco – with a florid chamber orchestra. The result, swept along by a recurring sentimental theme (reminiscent of Gato Barbieri’s more acrid score for Last Tango in Paris), amounts to a history of Italian music over the last century. It’s so out-of-step with today’s world that finding a niche will be difficult; an invigorating, even intoxicating, fin-de-siecle jaunt, it may not be “hip” enough for the anything-goes postmodern aesthetic. This outsider’s spot is exactly where Miscena wants Egea to be.
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For the “soul” of Italian music, Miscena says, one must go 400 km. southwest to Naples, where saxophonist-composer Marco Zurzolo, leader of the 12-member Banda M.V.M. (“Mamma vita mia”), was a local treasure unknown outside the teeming city until Egea came knocking. Zurzolo is a longterm “project” of Miscena’s, unveiled to the rest of the world in Perugia at the 2000 edition of Umbria Jazz. He hopes Zurzolo’s mix of Mediterranean folk styles – brilliantly making the connection between North African Arab roots and classic Neapolitan bel canto – will capture the imagination of world-beat partisans.
Naples basks in chaos. Cars careen the wrong direction on one-way streets while polizia lazily chat up ladies, and wrinkled women sell incense made of manure to ward off evil spirits. Dilapidated vehicles serve as storefronts for dozens of neatly arranged hubcaps: steal by night, sell by day. Balconies bear laundry of moldering stucco-crumbled apartment buildings crowned by satellite dishes. Naples’ streets ooze the theatricality of superstition: Lucky charms, figurines and Pulcinellas are sold in every nook and cranny of the wide-open port’s old Spaccanapoli section, a real-life “street museum” known as La Vie Del Arte. Here Zurzolo, 39, lives in a spacious old apartment – postmodern curves and beiges – around a corner from the conservatory where he now teaches. At a nearby cathedral is a shrine for Madonna del’Arco, Zurzolo’s patron saint (everyone has one in Naples, to perform miracles on every nagging problem), where he plays in her honor each May. His first album, Ex Voto, included a musical suite conjuring the feverish atmosphere at the festivals devoted to the liquification of the blood of Naples’ San Gennaro.
“Naples is like Cuba because you can breathe music here,” says Zurzolo. “Forget about the pizza and the Pulcinellas, and the other cliches. Under the amusing, dancing, festive Naples, you find a bitter undercurrent. Life is difficult here.”
If Zurzolo draws inspiration from the trance-inducing superstitions of Naples, he also suffers from its cutthroat insularity. He’s had club bookings cancelled when cheaper acts were found. Yet he’s comfortable here. His local café, its door festooned with covers of his Egea CDs and newspaper clippings, delivers orange juice and espresso to him while he’s in bed reading the Sunday papers. Whether on stage or a walking tour of his historic ‘hood, he wears a beatific smile on his cherubic face. Stopped by passersby and shopkeepers, the expression “Bellissimo!” comes easily to him. Zurzolo favors black jeans and work boots. Besides the requisite editions of Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, he owns every album by Masada, John Zorn’s Jewish counterpart to Zurzolo’s Arab-influenced Neapolitan sound. He empathizes with Zorn & company’s “downtown” New York scene for creating “very contemporary jazz but with strong folk roots. This is what gives you a strong personal identity.”
This is a familiar refrain throughout Europe. For Zurzolo it started when he followed his brother backing singer-songwriter Pino Danielle, who synthesized Neapolitan pop flavors, and later played for Italian superstar Zuchero. He also accompanied Chet Baker during the trumpeter’s last year. When Miscena asked him to dig deeper into his roots, Zurzolo followed the ancestral path across the Mediterranean to study in Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey, returning with an oud, a chiramella (a horn like instrument that emits a weirdly flat haunting wail), and frame drums. It’s a big, juicy sound: large tambourines, marimba, accordion, bouzouki, Portugese guitar, full horn and percussion sections. He still disagrees, sometimes vehemently, with Miscena’s recording ban on jazz drums. But the Egea chief just smiles, promising that Zurzolo’s next album will feature a “full authentic percussive exploration” to render such carping moot.
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“Canto Nascosto means ‘hidden song,’ reflecting something deep within myself,” says Enrico Pieranunzi of his rapturous recorded celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the piano (“my 88-key island”), performed on five models, that showed up on many Italian critics’ Best-of-2001 lists. “It’s a simple, almost crab-like melody, very connected to the sounds and atmospheres I listened to as a child. Egea allowed me to discover an area of my composition work that would’ve been hidden.” Listening to Pieranunzi is hearing a man tinkering with emotion, reflecting, refining, all towards savouring emotions as part of experiencing them.
Pieranunzi briskly marches me through his Rome, the wide expanses of the historic Seven Hills center within walking distance of his apartment. Nearby the Coliseum hundreds of fat tourist-fed cats lumber about languorously. “I’m lazy like those cats. I prefer staying here and studying rather than touring.” Wearing a black turtleneck, herringbone jacket, dark green corduroys, and drape-shaped brown wool overcoat, bespectacled, he quietly exudes a stylishly academic air. He explains how Mussolini built the Via Nazionale we’re strolling along as the ultimate photo op, and frets over the consequences of a nation run by a media titan (Silvio Berlusconi). “People tend to forget now, they’re more willing to forgive Mussolini. Will we ever learn from the past?”
He’s clearly enjoying the creative time of his life, with half a dozen releases over the past 18 months or so. His partnership with supple bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joey Baron (dating to 1984) reached an apex with last year’s homage (on Cam-Sony) to film composer Ennio Morricone, for whom Pieranunzi was a session man in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Earlier this year he recorded a duo session with Johnson, with whom he shares poignant psychic connections: he was the last bassist for the tortured lyricist Bill Evans, a hero of Pieranunzi’s and subject of his lovely meditative study, The Pianist As An Artist (published in a bilingual edition by Stampa Alternativa, Rome). Steeped in the perspectives of musician, fan and philosopher, the little 160-page volume is one of the true gems of jazz literature. He also recorded an interpretation of Wayne Shorter’s music (Infant Eyes) with his Dutch trio anchored by leading European bassist Hein Van de Geyn; at the same session, “taking breaks from very complicated music,” they recorded 18 Improvised Forms for Trio and released both simultaneously, a strikingly effective contrast of elements. When I last spoke with him, he was busy preparing his first work with a string quartet, studying how the masters scored (“A fifty-something cramming like a 15-year-old,” observed a friend).
“My father was a composer of typical Roman folk music. Italy has so many strong cultures, such as in Naples or Sardinia, that in Rome the folk culture is somewhat overlooked because it’s such a cosmopolitan capital. My father was also a guitar player, and that’s why I started playing jazz when I was five years old. There were only jazz records in our house: Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Django Reinhardt. My father was unbelievably fond of Django, so I grew up with this gypsy sound around all the time. He bought me a piano and was my first teacher, and – this is an interesting cultural process – taught me the blues that he learned from Django. I started improvising with my father, but he also encouraged me to take classical lessons. I kept on this double track until my mid-20s, when jazz virtually consumed me. Yet even when I was played with visiting bop musicians like Johnny Griffin, Art Farmer, Kenny Clarke, I gave classical recitals once in a while. There’s never really been a separation between the two expressions in my life.”
The full musical ramifications of this realization are now being explored in his relationship with Egea. The absence of the jazz drum kit from the label is a problem, says Pieranunzi, because American conceptions of jazz are closely related to its physical rhythmic impact. “Egea stresses a melodic approach, the colors and construction of the music, the story-telling sense of the tunes. Music is inspired by life, and in Europe the taste of life is different. If American ears can make an effort to gravitate towards that, the music becomes clearer.”
That’s a big if, coming in the midst of American pop culture’s post-9/11 war drumbeat. “The problem we see in Europe is that not everything is black and white,” says Pieranunzi. “Maybe America would be better off trying to dialogue with the Arab nations, even the fundamentalists, than bombing them. But it’s too late now.”
He pauses, sighs, caught in the inevitable Euro conversation. “Perhaps somebody will accuse me of being anti-American, but that’s not at all true. I became a jazz player almost solely because of the cultural penetration here by American musicians and records. Yet the deep spirit of this music sometimes seems to be lost on Americans themselves. The amazing possibility that you can play the blues in Tokyo, or with an Arab together with an Italian and a Russian. Some American intellectuals are lazy in understanding the universality in this music. Even if I play ‘Italian’ or ‘European,’ and Joe Lovano plays very ‘American,’ there’s a point at which jazz is art and the differences between cultural backgrounds fade from view.”
Just when internationalism established a beachhead on North America shores over the last decade, the America-first backlash reared its head. In the noirish battle against terrorism, is the ephemeral search for beauty seen as a luxury (or, indeed, a threat to homefront vigilance)?
“It’s ironic that the more corporate globalization there is, the more there seems to be a need for human groups to stress their own identities. Globalization does not mean only one culture dominating the planet. Many people believe it means having a better way of life without canceling their own identity. It’s a difficult issue that requires dialogue. Having an interest for other peoples is not always easy, but I think it’s the only way out. Otherwise, the perspectives are really dark for humanity, even darker for artists. In this state of perpetual war, the meaning of what it is to be an artist can be lost, and it becomes very difficult for a painting or piece of music to find its place anymore. All this can become depressing, but as artists we must react. Jazz is one of the best ways to do this, because it is so connected to basic human features: creativity, freedom, the body, sensitivity, no matter the color of one’s skin, or one’s language.”
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In the liner notes to his recently-released Perugia Suite, Pieranunzi muses: “What connection could there be between the Etruscans and jazz? Pretty strange question, highly improbable link. And yet every time I find myself playing in Perugia this bizarre question comes into my mind.” The Etruscan spirit of divination permeates the mood of this town, “unique in all the world.” The art of divination sees the future in the signs of the present, “whereas jazz succeeds, through improvisation, in making of the future the present or, better yet, of the present … the present.” Perugia, and thus Egea, is an escape into a “sort of ‘time machine’ full of diachronic suggestions: the distant past alongside the present, places evocative of very ancient times hosting jazz improvisations spotlighting the moments of today.”
Miscena says the artists who record for Egea accept his prickly perimeters – his devotion to where sound roots can still lead listeners – in favor of creating something unique. Egea’s projects, he says, take time to be recognized. Gabriel Mirabassi agonized over a new recording contract with Enja, a larger German label whose association with Rabih Abou-Khalil will doubtless further his career, while Egea grapples with the problems of distribution in a corporate climate. He says he “felt like a traitor. But maybe Enja’s exposure will lead people to the projects I will continue to do with Egea.” Meanwhile, Miscena directs ancient traffic in a wired world from his eleventh century tower.
Guinga & Mirabassi
The clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi admits that his “musical itinerary” – a rare blend of Mediterranean folk roots, classical chamber music tradition and Afro-American jazz improvisation – embraces a mix “not many musicians are interested in. This particular combination of ingredients is difficult to find.” That he should discover a kindred spirit, Guinga, an ocean and self-contained continent away in Brazil, bespeaks of hidden histories they discovered in common. The Italian virtuoso, who has lived his entire life in the ancient Etruscan town of Perugia, speaks of finding part of his soul in a vast tropical place. And Rio’s master of melody connected with impressionistic classical roots (from Villa-Lobos to Debussy) playing in Perugia’s creamy white and gold-trimmed St. Cecilia auditorium, built in 1634, its cupola creating a great illusion of light and space around the tiny balconies of what was once a medieval listening hall.
It was here that they recorded Graffiando Vento, which translates as “scratching wind,” says Mirabassi. “In other words, impossible, no? In Portuguese they use the metaphorical expression ‘scratching strings’ for playing guitar. We adapted it into Italian with the idea that Guinga’s guitar was scratching the wind of my clarinet.” He was also shaking some deep roots loose in Mirabassi’s playing, which soars with relaxed sweet relief that belies his perfectionism for challenging melodies.
Mirabassi’s “discographical journey” through his folk-classical-jazz matrix began a dozen years ago, when his duet with then-unknown French accordionist Richard Galliano became the first release for Egea Records, the hometown boutique label sometimes likened to ECM in its dedication to purity of sound. He collaborated with leading European players like Enrico Pieranunzi, Battista Lena and others partaking in a kind of quiet genre-busting that does not call attention to itself. Two Brazilian discs – a duet with classical guitar star Sergeo Assad and a tribute to Pixinguinga, Brazil’s architect of traditional choro – preceded Graffiando Vento. “Finally, in Guinga I met the personification of what I was looking for and couldn’t reach alone.” At 55, the darkly tanned Guinga – who, dressed in black and toting a guitar case, walks bowlegged as if from a spaghetti western – sizes himself up with typical modesty: “I am not a big star, but I am a respected composer among musicians.” In a vast nation bursting with music, that is no small deal. Many claim Guinga’s melodically inventive compositions over the last 20 years are nonpareil; dozens have covered his songs, from Clara Nunes, Leila Pinheiro and Elis Regina to Mark Murphy and Michel Legrand. As Djavan described: “It’s as if Guinga were the only living student in a school whose teachers are Villa-Lobos, Pixinguingha and Tom Jobim.” Hermeto Pascoal added: “He’s someone who appears only once in a hundred years.” His recent album, Noturno Copacabana, offers his trademarks: He makes a handful of instruments sound like a small orchestra, uses strings judiciously as counterpoint to his supple guitar.
Mirabassi was bowled over by Suite Leopoldina, a 2000 work conjuring voyages from a major Rio train station. “One of the masterworks of the century,” says Perugia’s prodigal melomane, 37, coiled in thought. “When I saw him with his band it was like, man, eureka, this is it! I don’t need to write anything anymore – it’s already there in Guinga! And working with him was like a dream. It was like the first time – I mean, I found what I was looking for! Now you can understand how valuable Graffiando Vento is to me. And yet I talk of it as my record – well, I did not write one tune! I just put myself at the service of his music. Because I thought, This is my music!”
They caught up with each other last autumn – as Guinga’s quartet performed at the Perugia Classico instruments exhibition and recorded an album for Egea – and talked music across continents and traditions. Names like Leonard Bernstein, Vernon Duke, Clifford Brown, Charles Mingus, Olivier Messiaen and Brazil’s classical icon Heitor Villa-Lobos were avidly discussed. They prefer Gordon Jenkins’ string arrangements for Sinatra in the 50s over Nelson Riddle’s (“more hysterical,” says Guinga with a gleam).
Guinga compares pieces by Schumann and Scriabin to choros, and Mirabassi find it “astonishing that in Brazil there’s no divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.” If music is misunderstood, “the problem is language. It doesn’t make much sense to say ‘classical’ or ‘popular’ music anymore. I mean, let’s divide it into good or bad. For me the best classical composer of the 20th century was Duke Ellington. It’s classic American music of its time. I find Ellington mirrored in Villa-Lobos’ typical-Brazilian approach.”
Villa-Lobos, for Guinga, “is like Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Mahler … inspirational melodies like Chopin. Life without melody is very poor, very ugly. My family, my wife, my mother, my daughters – my life is in melodies.” His voice, a gentle high tenor, and supple guitar are informed “by the songs my mother sang for me. I learned to accompany her. The voice is the most beautiful instrument, and she had a beautiful, beautiful voice. She’s 76 now and doesn’t sing anymore, but when I play I try to feel the songs as my mother sang them.”
He recalls being mesmerized at age 11 by the 1961 Stan Getz classic Focus, framed by Eddie Sauter’s taut, melodramatic string arrangements (and three years before the American popularized bossa nova globally). “I began playing guitar at the same time, and I heard Getz’s improvisations in my head.” He proposes some wordplay on a familiar tune: “Stan Getz in your eyes!”
Meanwhile, Mirabassi wondered what he’d see “reaching a place of my soul” on his first visit to Brazil [in 200x]. “Because I’d fallen in love with Brazilian culture over the last few years, finally going to the mythic land risked disappointment. Yet it was even more than I expected. Obviously Brazil is a country with incredible Third World social and economic problems. But what’s more valuable for me is that their music has an important function – deep and complicated, popular and cultivated – in the daily life of the people. It is a means of communication. This is something I miss here in the First World that makes it difficult to come back from Brazil.”
Mirabassi discerned something of the Old World in Brazil, too. When he says a Guinga composition like Cine Baronesa “could easily be tropical versions of Mascani, Puccini,” he sees a country “where the presence of Italian culture is more deeply rooted than anywhere outside Italy.” Sao Paolo is the third-biggest Italian city of the world, after Rome and Milan. He came across a book by an early scholar of the samba school that reported “old sambistas were of mixed blood, they had names like Genaro and were black.”
If the term Afro-American is linked with gospel, blues, ragtime and jazz, says Mirabassi, we forget that “the African presence in Brazil is much stronger than it is in the U.S. The northeast of Brazil is almost like Africa, with its macumba religions – it’s not the same as going to, say, Detroit.” This is where the mix of ethnic, classical and improvising cultures gets very real for Mirabassi. “The European culture that impacted the south of America was Mediterranean culture.”
He rolls his r’s grandly when using words like “great” and “incredible” because he is, of course, an Italian for whom the ineffable mysteries of music and art reign as supreme as Puccini and Fellini. “For me it’s of prime importance that I know why and how I make music.” A turning point occured when he and Guinga played the Umbria Jazz festival [2003?] at Téatro Morlacchi, a grand faded old opera house seating 600. “There were 250, 300 people and every single one of them – this is not myth or legend – were crying. It was the first time I saw an audience where everyone held a handkerchief or Kleenex. I didn’t need 1,000 people, this was proof enough for me – I mean, this is the music I want to do.
“You see, I had started to lose the meaning of playing for an audience, the reason why. I don’t see myself as an entertainer, but neither am I a monument of music, I’m not Bach. So what should a musician’s function be in society? This is a political question that intrigues me, politic in the ancient Aristotelian sense. I had become tired of the show business world, where money is the primary goal, and fed up with the avant-garde world where music is closed in on itself.”
He spoons thick hot chocolate, as he has since childhood at the glittering Café Perugia; his family goes way back [ADD]. He lives surrounded by trees and hills just outside town, his dining and living room walls lined with alphabetical rows of CDs in jazz, classical, opera, ethnic categories, crowned by his collection of Duke Ellington, who is of course beyond category. Then there is his infatuation with Brazil, “I’ve brought back 700 CDs. I need a new wall!”
“I grew up and live in a place that was the center of the world 500 years ago.” The city’s violent past as a middle-ages trading capital – with vicious family rivalries, killings and blood-sport (heart-pulling, stoning contests, poisonings) – has given way to a leisurely life of a provincial tourist town, with its Umbria Jazz and EuroChocolate festivals and two universities (one for foreigners opened by Mussolini himself). From dark-stoned and rustic terra cotta architecture, its history is told along winding vias stretching from the eleventh century to the 19th century gran via Corso Vanucci in a matter of a few hundred metres. [There’s the weekend parade of students in stylish hip-hop gear alongside classic Italian elegance on along the Corso, and busloads of grandmothers on day trips to the antique market and the Perugina and Sandri chocolate shops.]36
“What is left here has to do with a concept of art that’s very clear for me. Italian renaissance painting is a daily lesson for me,” he says, noting his idol Piero della Francesca (1416-1492) in the Galleria Nazionale across the corso. Their “incredible technique was a skill necessary to expressing deeply what they could see. A painter is a person whose ‘job,’ as it were, is to see more than I see. You become an artist when you develop the tools to give other people the possibility to see what you see. As deep as your vision may be, you need technique to express it and offer it back.”
Ask him how he got into jazz and Mirabassi quips, “By accident, of course!” At an early age he noticed the instrument held by Johnny Dodds on the covers his father’s Louis Armstrong Hot Five records. “I very much liked the shape of the clarinet, this strange long black wooden horn.” His father, who played piano and accordion in dance bands of the 1960s, also owned “a strange compilation album of early Roland Kirk on a fly-by-night Italian label. I loved the wandering spirit of Kirk, who’s still one of my great idols.” However his professor told him playing jazz on clarinet “was dangerous and could destroy my technique. So I played jazz horribly on piano just for fun.” It was only after he graduated with honors from Perugia’s F. Morlacchi Conservatory in 1986 and became a professional – specializing in the modern stuff, performing with such figures as Gunther Schuller, John Cage, Jurg Wyttenbach and Louis Andriessen – that he picked up jazz again. “Having started to play jazz for fun, I slowly started learning the language. And now, almost by chance, my professional life is the opposite of what I trained for.”
A musician, says Mirabassi, “devotes his life to listening, he hears much more than normal people. His goal is to offer this aural vision for an audience by developing a technique that expresses this depth as precisely as possible. I hate this notion that the poet doesn’t need technique. What the hell does that mean! That music is divided between extra-skilled musicians without emotion, and those who aren’t able to play but are ‘poetic’? Bullshit! Technique is not an absolute – technique comprises the tools you need to express your aural vision. I reject the idea that Miles Davis didn’t have technique. He didn’t have the technique to play a Haydn Concierto, but that wasn’t his aural vision. But he had an enormous personal technique to express his vision, like Monk. And what about Bill Evans, one of the biggest ‘poets’ in jazz history, no? Can you say that Evans didn’t have good technique?”
Coming from a contemporary background, he saves scathing words for an avant-garde now curated by the old guard: “It’s conservative and reactionary, modernity has nothing to do with it. Listen, ‘avant-garde’ is a dead word that belongs to a definite period in the history of human thought, from before the Second World War until the 1970s. But now it’s a romantic concept, created by the press. I’ve heard incredible phrases, like ‘Melody is fascist’ – what the hell are you saying?” he sputters. “Melody is music. The human voice is the instrument, all the others are created to get as close as possible. Listen to Johnny Hodges, and I rest my case.”
And listen to Guinga’s guitar filigree as the glue for a group comprised of electric guitarist Lula Galvão (who also plays for Caetano Veloso), longtime clarinet cohort Paulo Sergio Santos (who plays in Quartetto Villa-Lobos), and Jorginho (Jorge Alberto de Paula) a large round trumpeter from Brazil’s south whose joyful originality made jaws drop. Guinga discovered him in a marching band in Brazil’s most German-influenced (and racist) province. Dancing on his toes, leading with his belly, ready to lift off like a hot air balloon, Jorginho brings an effervescent lyric sway springing off the beat, his technique balmy as a breeze, his mute opening bouncy melodic possibilities far from the standard noir Miles wannabes.
“The real problem in world-music,” says Mirabassi, “is that putting funky drums on top of an Indian raga doesn’t create anything, it amounts to a lack of respect. It’s not where a culture meets – it’s a point where a culture breaks, where people in the middle of Sahara drink Coca-Cola. It’s not something of freedom, it’s the beginning of the end.”
In a globalized world Mirabassi basks in Perugia’s provincialism. “When I return here from concerts it’s because of this quality – poetic or magic – of being provincial. I’m able to profit from the sheer beauty that surrounds me, because I have nothing to do here professionally. Part of my fascination with Brazil comes from the same wonderful condition: they are incredibly provincial, couldn’t be otherwise, but Brazil has a huge continental dimension in being provincial. It’s a paradox in terms, and I think part of Brazil’s greatness comes from this paradox.” It’s a nation of 179 million, official language Portugese, surrounded by Spanish-speaking people (and anglos to the north), with an ocean to cross to find a “mother country” of only 10 million Portugese. “It’s a continent full of differences, so to be Brazilian is not a concept, it’s a condition, it’s provincial. The meaning of being provincial is that it gives value to being in one place instead of another, for better and worse.” He laughs. “Here in Perugia, it’s so small it’s somehow ridiculous. But identity has endurng meanings.”
“If I couldn’t feel that my last album was my best, I’d probably stop playing. But in terms of tone and chamber music interplay, there are moments where I think – excuse me if I say so – it’s perfect.” He laughs when he makes the obligatory reduction: “It’s basically what we felt as a duo communicating.”
“I don’t know which is better, the music or the man. No, he is first a great human being, then a great musician.”
“Sometimes I feel like an endangered species,” says Guinga, dark eyes wide as a bird’s.