GIOVANNI GUIDI TRIO – THIS IS THE DAY / ECM 2403 player
This is an album that poses questions both for us and the people who will hear it. The aim is to draw the listener’s attention to the areas that might seem at first elusive. Perhaps it is here that we can find the real intensity, the real meaning, of the work…
Giovanni Guidi
This Is The Day is Giovanni Guidi’s second album as a leader for ECM, following on from the 2012 recording City of Broken Dreams. The young Italian pianist, born in Foligno in 1985, was launched on the international stage in the groups of Enrico Rava. After being struck by the concentrated, impassioned qualities of the young pianist’s playing during the summer courses of Siena Jazz, Rava invited him into his band, and has since recorded with him on the ECM albums Tribe (with the Rava quintet) and On The Dance Floor, a live album with the Parco della Musica Jazz Lab in Rome.
This Is The Day again features Guidi’s international trio, with US bassist Thomas Morgan and Portuguese drummer João Lobo. Morgan recorded for the first time on ECM with guitarist John Abercrombie in 2008 on Wait Till You See Her and has since participated in albums of strikingly diverse character, including Wisława by Tomasz Stanko’s New York quartet, Chants with the trio of Craig Taborn, Sunrise with Masabumi Kikuchi and Paul Motian, Mbókò with David Virelles and, most recently, Gefion with Jakob Bro’s trio. Morgan’s style, melodic and essential, characterized by the fullness of touch, has been likened to that of Charlie Haden. It also shares with Haden’s approach an almost minimalistic sense of assurance yet is at the same time supremely adaptable. Guidi often cedes a central role to his bassist, as on the second song here, "Carried Away", yet one could hardly speak of a bass ‘showcase’: Morgan is too thoughtful a player for demonstrative display.
João Lobo came out from the school of the Hot Club de Portugal in Lisbon before moving to The Hague. Like Giovanni Guidi, he played with Enrico Rava in 2002 at Siena Jazz and the Guido-Lobo association has been firm since. In line with the great jazz piano trios of the post-Bill Evans period, Guidi emphasizes the total independence of the players, but never to the detriment of the structural strength of the songs, whose elegant proportions are underlined by the gaunt phrasing of the musicians, intent on drawing the maximum meaning and effect from each carefully placed sound: exemplary in this regard is "Trilly" the opening track resubmitted in a subtly changed variation in the course of the album.
“What I really admire about Thomas and João is the depth and intensity with which they approach music of any kind,” says Guidi. “All the pieces that I write for this group are written with them in mind. Thinking about the characteristics of their playing - free, direct, profound and with a strong emotive element – I try to bring these qualities also into the music that I write.”
As the group deepens its poetic language, it is able to turn with rapidity from the soothing melodic qualities of a song like "Game Of Silence" to the fragmented dialogues of "Cobweb" and to dissonant or wildly rhythmic passages like those of "The Debate". In contrast to the debut album there is also an opening up to the world of standards, a meditative version of "Quizas Quizas Quizas" (associated most of all with Nat King Cole) undergoes a thorough transformation and in "I'm Through With Love" they explore the rhythms and harmonies of a song that has fascinated creative musicians since the 1930s when Mildred Bailey made it her own.
With This Is The Day, Giovanni Guidi, barely thirty years old, reconfirms his position as the outstanding Italian jazz pianist of his generation, a contemporary improvising player looking deeply into the implications of melody.
This Is The Day was recorded in the Auditorium Stelio Moro of the Swiss Radio and Television, in Lugano, in April 2014 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
Further ECM recordings with Giovanni Guidi are in preparation.
