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Lovely Day(s)

Image of Lovely Day(s)

$14.00

From the first notes of this, his first album of solo performances, the imposing
Italian pianist Roberto Magris spreads just about all of his cards on the table. He fans
them out in a dazzling display of virtuosity and imagination; he stacks them into
architectonic narratives that make you forget you’re listening to “only” one musician.
Deep-down blues bleed into rumbling rubato. Improbably speedy boogie-woogie bass
lines anchor post-freedom arpeggios. A West African ostinato sets the stage for avant
garde stabs and shards. You’ll have to wait till the third track for his coruscating bebop
choruses, and his soaring, utterly modern extensions built on the bop framework. But
he’ll get there.
That opening track, “Blues Clues,” is the only Magris composition on Lovely
Day(s), but he has no trouble investing the rest of this program with his pianistic
exuberance. On Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing,” it takes him barely 75 seconds to
go jetting off into knuckle-twisting flights of fancy that nonetheless remain tethered to
Monk’s idiosyncratic melody; his sudden segues, from two-part contention to unison
lines, ought to take your breath away. Billy Strayhorn’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing”
contrasts the parlor politesse of the theme with skyrocketing asides. And Leonard
Bernstein’s “Lonely Town” elicits a brooding romance in the theme, but impatient
ebullience in the subsequent chorus—a distinctive mélange, to be sure.
A reviewer once called Magris “One of the finest piano players on the planet,”
and there’s plenty here to support that claim. The facts have been on display throughout
Magris’s discography. But alone in the spotlight, with Magris unbeholden to the
exigencies of leading a group, the evidence emerges, with specific clarity: here is a
powerful yet puckish pianist who proves himself a genial guide through the artistic
corridors of his intellect and soul. You’ll find no better example than the composition
“Reverend du Bop,” the first half of which becomes an open-sky canvas for the pianist’s
most expressionistic utterances. It stands in striking contrast to Magris’s previous, lightly
Latin recording of the same song (on his very first JMood release, the trio album Kansas
City Outbound).
Magris recorded Lovely Day(s) in two sessions within 24 hours. But the album
was years in the making.
On previous discs in his four-decade career, Magris has occasionally included a solo
piano track. Glittering with technique, expansive in context, and brimming with
emotional immediacy, these stand-alone performances impressed not only listeners but
also Paul Collins, the owner of JMood Records, the label devoted to issuing Magris’s
music. “Paul proposed to me many times to do a solo piano album,” Magris explains,
“but I always postponed it.” For almost all of his JMood recordings, Magris had flown to
Kansas City, where the label is based, to work with American musicians, and he figured
that for a solo record, it would be more cost-effective to record closer to home.
He never figured, however, that this unaccompanied debut would take place in his
actual home town of Trieste—much less under circumstances that would allow him to
combine the precision of a studio recording with the energy that comes from a “live”
setting.
(This is no small distinction. Playing without an audience, whether in a studio or alone at
home, “I am facing my own experience in jazz, so I am really facing myself, in my soul—
a very creative and spontaneous process,” he observes. And yet, despite the essential
workshopping that takes place in these hermetic environments, he much prefers to play
for people other than himself. “There is an exchange of energies in music,” he says. “I
don’t like to play at home because I am dispersing energy to what? To the walls? I need
the audience when I play.”)
Magris might have made this record back in 2020, when he was scheduled to
play a solo piano concert in Trieste at the Circolo del Jazz Thelonious (Thelonious Jazz
Club). COVID-19 wiped that off the books: Italy was among the first and hardest-hit
nations at the start of the pandemic. When that concert was finally rescheduled to take
place in early 2024, the Circolo Thelonious decided to relocate the concert to the larger
Casa della Musica.
“But a couple of weeks before the show,” Magris recounts, “I suddenly remembered that
inside the Casa della Musica there is a recording studio, and that it uses that concert
hall as the main studio room. So, Paul Collins and I further considered the possibility to
return there the day after the show, keeping exactly the same instrumental set up, to
record some more solo tracks.” Between the concert and the studio session, Magris had
more than enough songs to choose from, and also had a title for the album. Lovely
Day(s) refers to the fact that he spent “two lovely days at the piano, concentrated on the
love that I'm trying to express and deliver with my music.”
Still, beneath that idyllic image lies “a sad irony, when we consider these are the same
days facing wars in Ukraine, Palestine, innocent kids killed, the risk of atomic holocaust,
old and new pandemics: troubled times, confused feelings, shadowed beauty in these
‘lovely days.’” This balance of unclouded realism and inspiring artistry finds its way into
such song choices—and the performances they yield—as the rarely covered “Verne,”
“The Time of this World Is at Hand,” and “Saga of Harrison Crabfeathers.” And those
compositions—by pianists Andrew Hill, Billy Gault, and Steve Kuhn—hint at Magris’s
range of listening, above and beyond his personal heroes McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston,
Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Oscar Peterson, whose music ensorcelled Magris
into jazz early on:
“In college, I was investigating out from classical music and listening to rock, and then
prog rock,” Magris explains. “And then a a friend made me listen to jazz, and I loved it.
So I bought an album by Oscar Peterson, and I was shocked.” (That’s a pretty common
first reaction to Peterson’s staggering virtuosity.) “And I thought: ‘I want to do that.’ And
then I got into bebop, just when the rest of the world was getting into free jazz!” He
began leading his own bands soon after that, bringing him into contact with other Italian
and European artists as well as with visiting American musicians. In 2007, he returned
the favor with the first of a series of more-or-less annual trips to Kansas City, Los
Angeles, and Miami, to record with American musicians on their home turf; along the
way, thanks to flight stopovers from Italy to K.C., he began appearing with Chicago
musicians onstage and also on record.
Those dates with Chicagoans have produced two albums of emotionally incisive
duets (one with bassist Eric Hochberg, the other with saxophonist Mark Colby),
requiring a quite different mind-set than the one needed for even a trio record. But the
solo format requires still another adjustment, for reasons obvious (there’s no one else to
lean on) and subtle.
“My approach is in the direction of expanding the harmonic and rhythmic freedom of the
songs,” Magris says, “trying to include ‘all’ in the sound of the piano, which is a strange
kind of percussion instrument that is able to also produce melodies and harmonies in
combination with rhythm. For me, it’s a matter of a frameless, unbroken, honest,
personal, direct journey into the akasha [shared consciousness] of the jazz music.
“It’s the place where Duke, Parker, Mingus, Trane, Monk—and not only the masters but
all the jazz musicians have and will put their music, their emotions, human sensibility,
experience, big or little art—for the benefit of everyone willing and able to enter that
place. And then to bring back something that, after being understood, elaborated, re
created, will return there, in the cloud, as a continued process of growth, expanded
beauty, and peace.”
That’s a lot for any one idiom to shoulder, let alone an idiom as vulnerably exposed as
solo piano. But as you’ll hear, Magris’s shoulders are wide and strong, as is the music
he invests with everything he wants to say.
NEIL TESSER
Neil Tesser is a GRAMMY-winning journalist/broadcaster based in Chicago. He is a
regular contributor to Jazziz Magazine and the host of Jazz Across America, from
Chicago streaming on KSDS Radio.