3.2.23
Berliner Suite, recorded in duo last year at Greve Studios in Berlin with the great trumpet player from Ukraine Dima Bondarev, is a suite, a set of instrumental pieces, which describes from my own view different places from the wonderful city I choosed to live in, Berlin.
Berlin is a world metropole where contrasts, opposites live together in a strange, creative, ever changing balance, and that is evident, in my perspective, from the architecture itself of the city, as well from the all kinds of people you can meet here, coming from all over the world and still sharing a common spirit of freedom, respect and often love for experimentation, weirdness and creativity in general. In this suite I give my personal impressions of Berlin mostly as I remember experiencing it for the first time coming here nine years ago. Every angle is characteristic and anonymous at the same time, and you can breath at the same moment both the enormous history of this city and its constant thrust towards the future, through experimentation and innovation.
Realised with the friendly support of Neustart Kultur 2022, Berliner Suite is available on all major streaming platforms from the link below and will be included, together with Stories by Two Narrators, in the album Double Take, which contains the whole recording session I did with Dima Bondarev and Johannes Barthelmes last year in Greve Studios, including some unreleased tracks and alternative takes from the recording. Double Take will be released on the 3.3.23.
You can stream or buy the whole album here:
https://listen.music-hub.com/sdz3Yo
6.1.23
My first release of 2023 is out on all major digital platforms! Stories by two narrators is a duo album with me on piano and Johannes Barthelmes on sax that I recorded last year in the Greve Studios in Berlin, with the support of Neustart Kultur 2022.
I always thought that jazz music, being the art of improvisation, is also the art of telling a story: every time a musician takes a solo on a piece, the musician should think that it is a story, something with a beginning, a development, an ending, going inside and outside a structure, or even improvising the structure itself completely on the spot, in the case of instant composing.
Every track in Stories by two narrators is like a tale told by me and Johannes, being like two narrators at the same time, interacting with each other and ultimately with the story itself, the music improvised by us on the spot, being sometimes partly written and (in most of the cases) being completely improvised.
This album is the first part of the complete recording I did in 2022 in Greve Studios in Berlin, the other half of it is a suite I composed, Berliner Suite, recorded in duo with the trumpet player Dima Bondarev, that will be released in the first week of next month.
You can stream or buy the whole album here:
https://listen.music-hub.com/cduVLm
Cover photo by Johannes Barthelmes
24.6.2022
You can stream or buy the whole album here:
https://listen.music-hub.com/ks3vhe
Hi lovely people, here we are with my second album release of 2022! Vocations Électriques is a tribute I wanted to do to the great french composer Erik Satie, the father of impressionism and dadaism in music, who astonishingly invented more than 100 years ago (!) minimalism and ambient music, two of the main genres that are still relevant in our contemporary times.
I always loved Satie's music and Vocations Électriques is actually a title from Satie himself, a temporary and then rejected name for his suite Descriptions automatiques, that I decided to use for my album, which is a modern electronic reinterpretation of some of Satie's well famous and less known works.
Satie, with the likes of Bach, Debussy, Webern or Messiaen, is one of the very few composers in music history, who succeeded creating a music beyond time, which sounds and will always sound contemporary, because it reached something universal in the human mind. For that reason I wanted to record some of his compositions with modern instruments, showing how his music effortlessly still sounds as if it were written yesterday.
In Satie's case, it is crazy to think that in his own very eccentric way, he invented many of the modern ways to create music, putting the seeds of minimalism and even serialism with his work Vexations, which consists of a very tiny piece that has to be repeated as a loop 840 times (it can be 35 hours long!), and that avoids completely any kind of recognizable harmonic progression, using instead a couple of intervals in a serial manner.
Most of the pieces in the album are short or incredibly short, like the 3 Harmonies, and to me was important to preserve the original compositions in their entirety as they were written, rearranging them using a plethora of different synths, samplers and electro-mechanical keyboards.
You can stream or buy the whole album here:
09.03.2022
My new album Milano Sessions will be published on the 18th March 2022 on all major streaming platforms!
You can stream or buy the whole Album here:
I am excited to share with you some beautiful tracks that I recorded some years ago in Milan with my italian trio, with Emanuele Garro on doublebass and Paolo Zucchetti on drums, together with some new compositions that I recorded in a piano solo session this year.
Milano Sessions is to me a bittersweet love letter that I wrote to my hometown Milano, which I left in 2014, moving to Berlin, where I still live and work.
I owe much to Milan, I was born there, I studied classical and jazz piano with amazing teachers and I had my first professional experiences as a jazz musician. Still, year after year, the city was becoming more and more to me like a cage, pushing me to desire a more international context to do my music, so I left Milan and I definitely found what I wanted in Berlin.
Milano Sessions is an ode to what are for me the most beautiful sides of my hometown and will include, besides the trio sessions that I recorded in Milan, also more recent compositions that I composed and dedicated to my old city, recorded for piano solo in studio in Berlin in 2022.
The realisation of this album was made possible by the friendly support of GEMA and Neustart Kultur 2021.
Deutsch:
Mein neues Album Milano Sessions wird am 18. März 2022 auf allen wichtigen Streaming-Plattformen veröffentlicht! Ich freue mich, mit euch einige wunderschöne Stücke zu teilen, die ich vor einigen Jahren in Mailand mit meinem italienischen Trio aufgenommen habe, mit Emanuele Garro am Kontrabass und Paolo Zucchetti am Schlagzeug, zusammen mit einigen neuen Kompositionen, die ich dieses Jahr in einer Piano-Solo-Session aufgenommen habe.
Milano Sessions ist für mich ein bittersüßer Liebesbrief, den ich an meine Heimatstadt Mailand geschrieben habe, die ich 2014 verließ und nach Berlin zog, wo ich immer noch lebe und arbeite.
Ich habe Mailand viel zu verdanken, ich wurde dort geboren, habe bei tollen Lehrern klassisches und Jazz-Klavier studiert und meine ersten professionellen Erfahrungen als Jazzmusiker gemacht. Dennoch wurde die Stadt für mich von Jahr zu Jahr immer mehr zu einem Käfig, der mich dazu drängte, meine Musik in einem internationaleren Kontext zu machen, also verließ ich Mailand und fand in Berlin definitiv, was ich wollte.
Milano Sessions ist eine Ode an die für mich schönsten Seiten meiner Heimatstadt und enthält neben den Trio-Sessions, die ich in Mailand aufgenommen habe, auch neuere Kompositionen, die ich komponiert und meiner alten Stadt gewidmet habe und die ich 2022 im Studio in Berlin für Klavier solo aufgenommen habe.
Die Realisierung dieses Albums wurde durch die freundliche Unterstützung der GEMA und Neustart Kultur 2021 ermöglicht.
Cover artwork by Ugo Dalla Porta
27.8.2021
Roberto Manzin's latest album is finally out! Blue Feather, which is also the title of one of the songs in the album, refers to the hope of a new beginning, a new cycle and I am very happy to have recorded this year in Berlin Roberto's beautiful compositions with these fantastic musicians, Francesco Beccaro on bass, David Guy on drums and of course Roberto Manzin on alto and soprano sax.
You can stream or buy the whole album here:
Cover Photo by Thomas Scharfstädt