Let’s take a beautiful park, add to it a municipality that has recovered it for the enjoyment of citizens by evicting the shop with sports facilities, children’s playgrounds and kiosks, add to it a beautiful stage and a 200-seat auditorium for summer shows, and we already have many right ingredients.
And after the Roman ones, here are the Ferrara nights. The secret one is to invite the Jazz Club Ferrara to organize at least a couple of jazz evenings. There isn’t much notice, and what’s more, in August the jazz summer is in its final stages, but much more is needed to put those at the Tower in a corner.
In the same period the Siena Jazz seminars were about to close, so a blitz beyond the Apennines and round-up of a group of musicians worthy of the well-known Torrione posters.
I don’t think it took much effort to round up Ethan Iverson, who has long been at home in the Ferrara club for which he recently reserved a truly memorable evening. Add to Iverson’s piano the very close-knit and experienced bass of Thomas Morgan, and we have a duo of great charm. -Thomas Morgan.
Fascinating yes, but also delicate and slender if you consider that he had to face a rather unfavorable surrounding acoustic environment: the reconquest of Coletta Park was so successful that late in the evening it was still presided over by a decidedly hyperactive Ferrara childhood.
It is urgent to reflect on the return of Carosello, which in my time announced the evening curfew for children: fortunately today we have a Ministry of Merit that is up to such an undertaking.
The duo took up the challenge with nonchalance, also thanks to a curious inversion in the role of acoustic prominence: the bass is forward, full-bodied and assertive, the piano a step back, concentrated on a subtle embroidery, mainly based on the high register of the instrument.
Morgan’s perhaps involuntary protagonism is also underlined by the repertoire choices: ample space is reserved for one of his originals, “Approach”, a medium tempo suffused with a delicate and dreamy attitude, followed by his arrangement of “When I Fall in Love”
But don’t think that Iverson’s unmistakable stylistic signature takes a back seat: the rest of the book at the base of the set is made up of standards, conspicuously filtered by the pianist’s somewhat fane approach.
The maximum economy of means that has long distinguished him clearly emerges, together with a calculated slowness that often characterizes improvisational developments. And so a ‘Swingin’ the blues’ by Basie, and a very classic ‘Stompin’ at Savoy’ parade.
Moving towards the heart of the concert, Iverson’s favorites begin to appear, modern classics that reveal his Tristanian penchant: a meditative “All the things you are” stands out, incubated for a long time by a dense and tortuous introduction, then broken up into long melodic lines very ‘horizontal’ and free of marked dynamic contrasts.
But jazz lives on dialectics, and immediately afterwards an intricate version of Ornette Coleman’s highly popular ‘Turnaround’ starts: many jazzmen like it, but Iverson applies himself to it as if it were his own thing.
After over 70 minutes of music, an attentive and concentrated audience, despite their hyperactive childhood, elicits an encore with long applause, a quick and elegant ‘Honeysuckle Rose’.
Then everyone goes home in the quiet Ferrara night, already planning to grab a place for the following evening. But this is a story yet to come…
