Flavio Caprera

Author: Flavio Caprera

Title: Franco D'Andrea – A Portrait

Publisher: EDT

Pages: 232

Price: 19 euros (paperback), 13.99 euros (ebook)

Telling the story of Franco D’Andrea means telling the story of Italian jazz. Taking on the writing of a book about the pianist from Merano, also known to progressive rock fans for his stint in Perigeo, is therefore a hugely ambitious challenge. Flavio Caprera's book, published in March for EDT's "Biblioteca di cultura musicale" series, not only pulls it off, but also turns out to be a gripping read with a decidedly unconventional approach.

Weaving together interviews, period documents (magazines, liner notes) and the author's own listening experience, the roughly 180 pages trace, in an orderly but never mechanical fashion, the musician's six decades – and counting! – of career. A life that has seen him converse as an equal with the greats of every era, move with real personality through the most diverse ages of jazz, and contribute decisively to the development of the Italian scene and its international standing. Bebop, hard-bop, post-bop, modal jazz, free, avant-jazz, progressive jazz-rock… and then back from swing all the way to stride, forward to contaminations with DJing, and "sideways" into immersion in serialism: there are very few styles D’Andrea hasn't tried his hand at. Just as countless, both in terms of instrumental line-ups and names involved, are the groups that have seen the pianist in a leading role, often recognized through the awarding of major music prizes (scattered between 1979 and 2018!). D’Andrea has played regularly, not just in passing, with Gato Barbieri, Aldo Romano, Lee Konitz, Miroslav Vitous, Tino Tracanna, Paolo Fresu, Dave Douglas, Ares Tavolazzi, and Joe Lovano: Italian, European and American musicians alike prize his pianistic versatility as much as the unmistakable character of his style.

From the second half of the Sixties onward, teaching and theoretical work also became important to him: his 2011 text "Aree intervallari" represents the synthesis of a decades-long investigation into the fundamental harmonic structures of jazz, able to reconcile and at the same time move beyond the many competing approaches that followed one another from swing to free. Trumpeter Enrico Rava, a pillar of Italian jazz and beyond, as well as a frequent collaborator of D’Andrea's, writes in the book's preface: "D’Andrea is a unique talent, so full of musicality that he can decode the secret of any instrument in no time at all. […] Although his habits don't match the stereotype of the jazz musician, he is one to the highest degree, and there are not many (if any) European pianists who can stand comparison with him, either then or now".

The book's critical approach reveals a deep devotion to the pianist's music, and is marked by an unusual perspective: however much it stays hidden between the lines, it's clear the author believes that D’Andrea's jazz is offering its most forward-looking and mature insights precisely in his work of recent years. Whether or not one shares this unconventional take on the career of an artist who has been "riding the crest of the wave" in his field for more than fifty years, the perspective has the real merit of drawing the reader into its enthusiasm and steering their interest even toward those later works that a more hurried account might, perhaps, have examined with less care.

Particularly worthwhile, too, are the frequent passages of harmonic analysis that accompany the discussion of tracks, albums and genres. Even a reader with no background in jazz theory can follow the thread that, through the device of chord substitution, links swing to bop to modal jazz and then to free — and all this without resorting to sterile academic digressions, while keeping D’Andrea's music firmly at the center.

This attention, unfortunately, slips away just at the best moment (at least from the point of view of a rock-oriented listener): right as the discussion turns to Perigeo, the care given to structural aspects steps aside, making room for considerations on instrumentation and the critical reactions of the time. These are fascinating elements, to be sure, but they leave one wondering about the reason for the shift in approach: perhaps the type of analysis depends on the written sources available for the different artistic phases?

It's also a shame that, when considering the later years of D’Andrea's artistic journey, synchronic comparisons with the most significant trends in contemporary jazz become increasingly rare: these would perhaps have been more incisive than the at times rather disorienting use of certain vague hyperboles so beloved by music journalism, which do little to help decode the music or place it within broader points of reference. From this latter standpoint, the frequent recourse to the adjectives "blues" and "intervallare" as catch-all terms feels like a missed opportunity: words that carry a precise meaning in themselves, but whose musical referents are never made explicit in the context of late D’Andrea's music, and which therefore end up largely devoid of any analytical role.

The critical points discussed above do not undermine the effectiveness and enjoyability of Caprera's work, which engages the reader and leaves them enriched with a cohesive view of our jazz history, equipped with dozens of listening suggestions, as well as the urge to put them into practice as soon as possible.

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02/02/2026