A concert that was in doubt until the last quarter of an hour, due to an unexpected storm that concluded two days of flood warnings, turned into a sold-out success.
This also happens at Chiavari in Jazz, and we must thank the organization and the service for the tenacity and a touch of risk that made the evening a success.
The fourth date of the summer festival featured the Out of Gravity project by Apulian composer and keyboardist Michele Papadia, leading a quintet completed by Fabrizio Bosso on trumpet, Francesco Bearzatti on saxophone, Stefano Tamborrino on drums, and Francesco Ponticelli on bass.
This project, epitomized in the album released by A.MA Records last April, features the same lineup augmented by international guests (rapper Kokayi, keyboardist Deshawn ‘D’Vibes’ Alexander, singer Angela Esmeralda, and conga and ngoni expert Kalifa Kone), and aims to condense Papadia’s black musical universe—fueled by jazz, funk, blues, hip hop, and gospel—into a contemporary and personal synthesis.
Papadia, a close associate of Gianluca Petrella on various recording ventures, adopts a unique approach to canons authoritatively explored in the past by musicians such as Herbie Hancock: he forgoes emphasizing the rhythmic component, condensing the pulse into the essential beat of bass, Rhodes, and drums, leaving ample space for thematic developments and the dialogic interplay of the two wind instruments, often intertwined in contrapuntal dynamics.
Electric and electronic keyboards and piano complete the front line with solos constructed in complete harmony with the sonic context. The live performance loses the album’s nu jaxz soul due to the lack of vocals, but gains in content and interplay, offering intense and defined music with precise structural coordinates, where improvisation has room but not excessively.
To the point that Bearzatti and Bosso are less explosive than in other circumstances, each with their own voices rich in depth and variation (the full and elastic sound of the sax, the torn phrases, the accelerations, the morphing of the trumpet), but careful to respect a well-defined overall perimeter.
The concert followed the album’s setlist, concluding acoustically with the ballad “Peace of Mind” and the evocative gospel-funk “In My Soul,” before the encore, “Freedom to Live.” A beautiful, black-and-white evening, and not just because of the clouds above the stage.
