Concert at Casa del Jazz, Rome, Italy, January 18^th, 2015
It’s a fact: jazz in the Nordic countries doesn’t like to take itself too seriously or to put on airs. The best Finnish pianist, and one of the best pianists in Europe overall, can kid around with the audience as if it were all a great game and at the same time express such virtuosity that he renders them speechless. Rantala’s first important solo tour in Italy was a great success, likely to be repeated. The tour ended in Rome, where he was welcomed with enthusiasm, even though he is not at all as well known here as he is in central and northern Europe, where he fills the auditoriums.

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Phronesis is one of the few European new jazz bands about which music critics of any generation are in almost total agreement, as has been noted in most of the major rankings of 2014. And their most recent work, Life to Everything, is a further leap forward in the already consolidated production of this group, whose leader is the magnificent Danish bassist Jasper Højby, also the composer of all the tracks in the band’s first two albums, and of most of the previous one. In Life to Everything, however, the boys shared the composition equally, each one responsible for three pieces. Most certainly, the band’s secret lies in the exceptional musical and personal balance of an ensemble in which each element stands out on its own so much that it is never subordinate to another, in an eternal playful game of tag. It is quite incredible: they always rise to each other’s heights. Not that in other bands the leaders crush the others, but Phronesis deploys not only a great pianist, the British Ivo Neame, but also the best double bassist and the best drummer (the Norwegian-Swede Anton Eger) of their generation. Phronesis overwhelms with its pulsating and propulsive style, maintaining a rock band energy that viscerally touches the listener, especially when live. This is why their album was recorded live instead of in the studio: it bears that seal of emotional contagion. No coincidence that the title of the album is the ending of a Plato quote, which is displayed on the CD cover: "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, […] and life to everything".
New jazz at the nth power, innovation, groove and a mixture of rhythms, often Latin as well, from flamenco to Afro-Cuban, passing through Brazil.

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There is a special quality in Norwegian –and Icelandic− jazz that distinguishes it, even from its Nordic (Swedish, Danish and Finnish) "cousins": a deep, ancestral, almost mystical, even pantheistic, bond with Nature. As if each chord holds a vast, contemplative breath of a landscape, whether marine or mountainous – in Norway, the land and water are inseparable− or related to fauna or flora, or to the white blanket that paints the ground to a blank space for many months. That contemplation often becomes almost meditative introspection, which for some takes on a nuance connected to the divine (I think of Tord Gustavsen, for example) and for other remains close to the broad but also beautifully minute sense of Nature and its secrets. I think this may be why Italians −who have lost their own Eden through overbuilding, overcrowding and urban alienation− have a special love for Norwegian music: in it they find their Lost Paradise.

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There is something ancestral and mysterious in this album, despite its simple and straightforward appearance. A secret quality that makes it special, intelligible to many, even to those who do not follow jazz. A record that makes you slow down, listen, reflect. And even for those of us who have a visceral love for jazz, it remains a mystery how an album of just piano & bass can be so powerful. In truth, one of my favorite albums of all time is Barron and Haden’s Night and the City, so in my specific case there is a precedent; and indeed Duo, the first album of Daniel Karlsson (piano) and Thomas Markusson (double bass), has a similar feel to it: soft and intimate, often introspective, albeit less nocturnal. It too is likely to become a classic.

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