Personnel:
Alessandro Lanzoni (p), Bud Powell (compositions)
Reference: FSNT-686
Bar code: 8427328436861
Fifteen years ago I encountered with delight a teenage Alessandro Lanzoni: shy, tousled hair, a demure smile that began to radiate when we played together, our two pianos interweaving and then separating again into individual voices. I was twice his age and my official job was to teach him–but I wasn’t sure there was anything that I could actually teach him.
Either way I wanted to figure out what this Millennial ate for breakfast. Quietly I formulated my agenda. Had he ever had a jazz teacher before? He shook his head, only classical maestros. His minimal English rivaled my minimal Italian, but he was already a fluent speaker of the jazz language. Both of his parents are piano professors in classical conservatories, so he grew up with two Steinways in the house. This helped explain access, motivation and talent… but it only deepened the mystery of how he learned to swing in Firenze. Did your parents listen to jazz at home? Negativo.
Per favore, Amico, try to think back, all the way back, I suggested. Can you remember when you first heard jazz? This question at first seemed to puzzle him. I paid close attention as his mind’s eye ranged all the way back like a cinematographer perched on a crane, surveying his inner landscape…ma si…me lo ricordo, il gioco della radio. The radio game. What was that? Alessandro told me that most of his friends enjoyed watching cartoons or kicking a football, but he preferred the radio game. This entailed perching himself at the piano on a pillow, listening to the family receiver and playing back whatever melody emerged. One day the dial landed on a jazz station and suddenly the flow of melodies expanded in complexity; his favorite game now seemed to have no end. No one ever told the kid this radio game was supposed to be hard, so it wasn’t. How old were you amico? Tre anni: three years old.
Bud Powell’s father, a stride pianist, also sat his little Bud at the piano at age three. Bud began formal classical piano lessons at five and by eight he could transcribe Art Tatum. Playing in church by age ten, by fifteen the prodigy had become a fixture of Harlem nightlife performing with adults. At twenty he had already found his voice as the fiery piano poet of bebop, be friended Monk and Charlie Parker, and the rest is the history of Black genius inmid-20th century America. Despite being forced into repeated courses of electro convulsive therapy and tranquilization, Bud’s brain was superhuman and his heart superheroic. He left innumerable treasures in his wake: as Herbie Hancock put it, Bud was “the foundation out of which stemmed the whole edifice of modern jazz piano.”
Over the past decade Alessandro Lanzoni has been quietly constructing his own floor of this edifice. As this remarkable album attests, architecturally Alessandro is firmly rooted but possesses a design sense very much his own. The family ‘business’ in Firenze is an influence of course, and one can hear a touch of Paris (also Bud’s second home), but much more deeply one feels Harlem, and in the dusky background New Orleans. Obviously on these tracks Bud reverberates in Lanzoni’s ears, but this is no longer the radio game. Our now-thirtysomething friend now prefers a different kind of highly sophisticated play: each song on this album is an adventure in improvised art. Alessandro keeps you on the edge of your seat, and at times even launches you out of it.
Lanzoni extemporizes in a personalized swinging language that feels grounded yet can fly. Suddenly leaving us breathless, he then gifts us with a moment of great beauty. Alessandro aims to keep himself guessing while keeping himself honest. Generously he invites us to join the fun, and soon we sit gladly in the palmof his hand. The result is a remarkable demonstration of musical values in action. Some are eternal principles passed down through Bud and his progeny.
Yet the lyric poet who here charms us is inimitably Lanzoni. This album’s repertoire lives completely in the moment, subtly spanning past present and future. Alessandro escorts us wherever the muse leads, a magnanimous guide to both the known and unknown. Gratitude is arguably themost inspiring of human emotions. Lanzoni’s love for Bud is both infectious and fruitful, and for this we are all grateful.
—Aaron Goldberg
