Bluebird Reviews | Gio Pilato

14/07/2024

There is no wonder why music can be considered as the sole art form able to translate human feelings and natural phenomenon happening around us truthfully, no matters whether said feelings or phenomenon are related to dramatic or more romantic and gentle moments.

The Italian Saxophonist and Composer  Extraordinaire Gianni Savelli knows very well how to represent, through music and his own talent and creativity, the aforementioned sensations, thanks also to the experience accumulated by the Italian artist through the many bodies of work that Savelli has been able to generate in various art-forms, throughout the last 40 years of his illustrious career.

Now, with a new album out, the fourth of Savelli's albums together with his long-standing project called Gianni Savelli Media Res and called Alisei, a project where, together with Savelli, within the Media Res collective there are some truly excellent musicians such as Fulvio Sigurta' on Trumpet, Alessandro Marzi on Drums and Percussion, Enrico Zanisi on Piano and Luca Pirozzi on Electric Bass, the Italian Saxophonist and Composer explores the idea of elements of nature like wind and sea working together in perfect synchronisation both up and under water, where new scenarios are constantly created by the movements of the winds, effecting sea life in every imaginable way at any point.

Savelli and the Media Res, in that respect, do an excellent job, through the 6 pieces included in Alisei, to allow the listeners to navigate with them into this metaphorical journey into marine life. The Italian Saxophonist and Composer and his collective, at times also supported by a 17-piece Jazz Orchestra, draw some inspired layers of contemporary Jazz that provide the ideal soundtrack to the album concept, with Savelli expertly chiseling moments of tensive crescendos to others where nature restores itself almost by default.

The overall result is highly effective; between the more rhythmic, imaginary collective dance among underwater flora and fauna of the classy album opener Melodia Sottomarina to the deliciously cryptic, in its noiresque Jazz style performance, of a piece like Nebulas, Savelli and his Media Res play very cleverly a musical game where music floats, just like water, on many different levels and different strengths, from a more sentimental one, at times, like on the composition called Delicati Effendi, to a more crepuscolar one, as perceivable in the album's closing number Alisei, with a great sense of balance between harmony and introspection.

A truly solid and inspired body of work coming from a talented and visionary composer, Alisei is also a record of ethereal beauty and intensity and, at the same time, the truthful mirror of a highly skilled musician and an artist like Gianni Savelli never afraid of challenging himself and move forward, in terms of musical vision.