SEA INSIDE - Sea Inside

The eighth release from Itinera, the label born out of the Pomigliano Jazz Festival, "Sea Inside" is a work that draws its deepest inspiration from visions of the sea, from the sea (the Mediterranean, first and foremost) as a bridge between cultures and civilizations, from the spiritual tides that alone can hand back to us fragments of a soul too often subjugated by the body's tyranny.

With Javier Girotto on saxophones, Francesco Nastro on piano, Avishai Cohen on double bass and Roberto Gatto on drums, this jazz with the "sea inside" offers us a scant seventy minutes of thoroughly good vibrations. The musicians' skill is beyond question and the listening experience is genuinely pleasant, though we can't help feeling the group chose to stay a little too comfortably within a certain "tranquil" conventionality.

The shifting atmospheres unfurl glimpses of composed otherness ("Song For Avishai"); a bittersweet ballad like "When She Leaves" (with Girotto's evocative sax and Nastro's piano seeming to mimic the tireless coming and going of waves) tells us of a farewell as long as eternity, of coastlines receding into the distance, of us buried by the horizon and by our own limits; and again, the loose-limbed evolutions of "Il suo lato migliore", growing ever more spacious and passionate, seem to want to fish back from the repertoire of Garbarek's Seventies output.

Always evocative, and at times quite spirited, the music of "Sea Inside" wants to tell us about the beauty of being together, about the magic from which music springs, about the small inner battles that sounds and melodies know how to give back to us. There's plenty of routine, it's true ("Rough Side", "Ann's Tune", "We Got On Well"), but also, as we've seen, moments of real interest, right up to that tribute to Diego Armando Maradona ("El Pibe de Oro") which sounds both placid and, at the same time, charmingly conclusive.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

26/04/2008