Moving Ahead

Album review

One of the most iconic tenets of Gerardo Frisina's recording and production signatures is his ability to render easily identifiable styles -- modal, post-bop, and Latin jazz; Afro-Cuban son, salsa, and descarga; digital dub and electronic music from house to broken beat -- in surprising fusions of harmonic imagination and arrangement. Moving Ahead, his eighth full-length, offers this wizardry in 14 new self-penned tracks performed by a crack nonet. Longtime collaborators on the date include Fender Rhodes and acoustic pianist Fabrizio Bernasconi, trumpeter Gendrickson Mena, drummer/percussionist Ernesto Lopez, baritone saxophonist/flutist Alfonso Deidda, bassist Enzo Frassi, and vibraphonist Luca Gusella. They are joined by relative newcomers to Frisina's stable including tenor saxophonist Mimmo Valente and legendary Italian jazz acoustic guitarist Francesco Bonagura (aka "Frabor"). One of the set's spotlight performers is young Gambian Haruna Kuyateh, a kora player and vocalist Frisina caught performing on a Milan street corner. "Naihi" opens the set with circular drums, hand percussion, and upright bass to establish a hypnotic groove. It's punctuated by reverbed tenor saxophone that introduces the fluid, silvery lines from Kuyateh's kora before he begins chanting in Gambian. It's dreamy and seductive. Valente's solo drives the cadence toward swirling dubby post-bop. "Que Dilema" frames drum and percussion loops atop a biting Fender Rhodes and muted trumpet, wedding electro-samba and house music to jazz-funk. The single "Marombo" blends jazzy hard bop piano, Latin jazz flute, and incantatory bossa bass as Gusella's vibes offer a ghostly melody that paves the way for killer baritone and tenor sax solos, amid conga and trap-kit interplay and soul jazz piano grooves. "Descentando" is led by the rhythm section in Afro-Brazilian mode atop dubwise production. A slithering muted trumpet carries trancelike fills before Bernasconi's Rhodes guides it to an exotic conclusion. "Cuiaba" is burning Latin jazz-funk with dubby horns, vocal chants, and buoyant percussion bubbling underneath fiery piano montunos. It's followed by "Guava," grafting 1970s-style jazz fusion onto punchy house and soulful samba featuring gorgeous Rhodes and conga work. "Vicky" is a smoky, intimate, late-night club jam. Upright bass and syncopated snare set a vamp framing a lithe melody offered by the horns before Frisina adds dub-house rhythm tracks framing Bernasconi's swinging, elegant post-bop piano solo. "Damay" is nocturnal Herbie Hancock and Headhunters-esque funk with punchy Rhodes vamps, hypnotically stitched-in rhythms, wah-wah guitars, and a soulful Latin flute break from Deidda. Clocking in at 74 minutes, Moving Ahead is an exotic, emotionally uplifting journey through Frisina's ever-expanding sound world. His canny compositions, arrangements, and organic and technological production processes join to pry the best from his musicians. In sum, his tunes deliver a cumulative intersection between global genres and jazz styles in a transcultural dialogue between rhythm and harmony as well as dynamic and texture.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo