# A book inside jazz. Rodolfo Cervetto: The sounds of life. three stories about jazz: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2024/06/12/87757752785/
- Published: 2024-06-12T00:02:24+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**“Almost everyone has had their chance with jazz. Almost everyone, by choice or
by chance, has come across a concert or a record, obtaining impressions ranging 
from proactive curiosity, a vague skin pleasure or disinterest.**

Someone has reported intolerance, but no specific clinical findings have emerged
to confirm it. I happened to encounter jazz through a film, “Round Midnight” by 
Bertrand Tavernier from 1986, a paraphrase of Bud Powell’s story in 1950s Paris,
played by Dexter Gordon. And since then, I was 25 years old, this music has become
an almost daily travel companion on a journey, still ongoing, through time and places,
in search of stories, characters and emotions.”

I apologize in advance for the self-quotation, but the outing of the writer of these
lines seemed to me to be in particular harmony with the spirit that pervades “The
Sounds of Life”, the book by Rodolfo “Rudy” Cervetto, an established jazz drummer
for over a twenty years, tireless animator of the Genoese cultural scene, where 
he presides over the historic Louisiana club, and driving force behind a thousand
initiatives also in the teaching and educational field.

![](https://i0.wp.com/traccedijazz.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/cerv.jpg?w=640&
ssl=1)

In the first of the three stories about jazz that make up the work, illustrated 
by the evocative drawings of Patrizio Colotto and introduced by Riccardo Bertoncelli,
a father passionate about jazz tries to involve his recalcitrant son with these 
words: “Let’s make sure that tomorrow you become passionate about a musician and
you start reading and listening to everything about him. Inevitably, if you dig 
into his story and his music, you will find many connections with other musicians.

Not only will you discover connections with photographers, journalists, dancers,
sound engineers, drivers, This is jazz. A music that is intertwined with life.” 
It seems like a description of mine, our passion and the endless journey mentioned
at the beginning. It is the story of a passion, therefore, which does not discriminate
between the role of the musician and that of the enthusiast, of those who listen
or perhaps go so far as to attempt to tell that world: in the author’s gaze, who
is above and who is in front of the stage is involved in the same path towards the
transmission of emotions, a path that can even do without words and is fueled by
understandings transmitted with a look or a smile. A “people” equipped with an extraordinarily
effective weapon to also share social demands, collective feelings, reactions to
the world around us.

Cervetto articulates this vision by mixing reality and fiction, real characters 
and eras of jazz history and fantasy enthusiasts, bearers of that spark of passion
that the musician’s intentions would like to unleash in the souls of young and inexperienced
readers. It is also the intention of the drummer Owen who, having reached the end
of a long career and lost his life partner, organizes a “last concert” dedicated
to the music of Art Blackey and the Jazz Messengers for an audience of young people
aged between 18 and 25 years old.

Throwing a symbolic baton to one of them to continue the story in his own way. All
three stories are also crossed by a melancholy vein which tells, starting from the
decline of the protagonist musicians, the difficulties, the dependencies, the often
precarious and fluctuating conditions of those who have chosen to live with jazz.

“Birdland 1953” alludes to a hypothetical sliding door for the life of Charlie Parker,
who, almost a hundred years old, is rediscovered by an old enthusiast, in the footsteps
of a dialogue started years earlier by his father, who, in turn, tells the son the
reasons for that love; “The Last Concerto” vividly describes the relationships on
stage between the musicians of an imaginary band, but with names that recall those
of real musicians, and the emotional current that exists with the young audience;“
A story to tell” is that of trumpeter Red, who went from the relative glory of the
ranks of famous Big Bands to the revival of swing, up to a destiny as a busker, 
always accompanied by his music.

“The sounds of life” is an anomalous book in the wide contemporary production on
jazz. Indeed it is a book “inside” jazz, in which the Ligurian drummer tries to 
give shape and explanation, using words rather than sticks, to that feeling that
often leads musicians or even the public to share a hug at the end of a successful
concert.

As we close these lines, we know that Rudy will be, like many other evenings, on
a stage behind the snare drum of his Soprano, in search of that moment of magic 
that dilates and crystallizes time, which “can only happen and be perceived if you
creates together with another person, in a collective dimension.” Like when Owen’s
band performs “I remember Clifford” and the audience is all on their feet. We sincerely
hope that it happens.

**Rodolfo Cervetto (drums) with Andrea Paganetto (trumpet), Maurizio Brunod (guitar)
and Marco Bellafiore (double bass)**

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