music
twelve o’clock, May 12, 2021 – 11:58 am
The latest album by the guitarist from Bari is released for Dodicilune, “Temporary Life?”, A magnificent example of unreconciled music of rare expressive strength, intensity and beauty
of Fabrizio Versienti
Mit is better to declare it immediately: “Temporary Life?», The new album by the guitarist and composer from Bari Rino Arbore, just released by the Dodicilune label six years after the previous one «The Roots of Unity»Is a record of rare expressive strength, intensity and beauty. The starting point are the photographs taken in 1943 of Czeslawa Koka, a 13-year-old Polish recluse in the Auschwitz concentration camp, by the prisoner-photographer Wilhelm Brasse: they are three portraits for the archives of the efficient bureaucratic machine of the concentration camp. The girl is terrified, has a bruise on her lip, has just arrived, does not speak a word of German and does not understand what is happening to her. Three months later she will be killed. Arbore starts from these images to develop a large musical fresco in ten original compositions crossed by a tension that never relaxes. It is as if the music itself is constantly questioning itself around categories such as violence, pain, responsibility and guilt, or rather trying to elaborate the complex moods generated by those categories.
At work it is a very “normal” quintet, apparently: with the leader on guitar there are Giorgio Distante on trumpet, Mike Rubini on alto sax, Giorgio Vendola on double bass and Pippo D’Ambrosio on drums. But what you hear is quite the opposite: the unison themes are rare, the melodic lines intertwine in a polyphony supported by the obscure pressing of the rhythm, and the solos (which also exist, all sound beautifully) fit into the in the collective plot. Arbore’s writing moves between extreme contemporaneity (“Useless bodies”) and free-bop («Czeslawa Cries»), With moments of great, poignant lyricism (from the title track a “Love at the bottom”). A complex, mature and exciting work.
May 12, 2021 | 11:58
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