Rating:
Genre:
Jazz
Release Date: 05/15/2007
To call
Stefano Battaglia's
Re: Pasolini on
ECM, ambitious would be an erroneous understatement. In fact, it is an undertaking of enormous propensity. In the United States,
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) is known primarily as a filmmaker, whose works such as the
Decameron,
Canterbury Tales,
Medea, and the notorious
Salo (based on the
Marquis de Sade's mammoth encyclopedic novel of perversion and violence, the
120 Days of Sodom, reset in the Italian countryside during the Second World War). He was in fact, a true renaissance man in the grand Italian tradition and was widely known as one: he was a popular poet, playwright, journalist, novelist, actor, painter, linguist and a truly controversial political activist who also challenged the Italian government, the Church and consumerist Italy openly. He was brutally murdered on an empty beach on the evening of All Saints Day (the murder has never been fully explained).
Pasolini was a giant figure, a near mythic figure in Italian society and an aesthetic giant in all of Europe. So how does one represent such a figure in music?
Battaglia has decided to look at
Pasolini's life and work in equal measure. He celebrates and examines them so closely in his medium, so as to be as close to the inside eye of the artist -- and perhaps the man -- as is possible. Over two discs, he uses two different ensembles to meditate upon the legacy left by this great and tragic artist through his chosen medium: a music that combines in equal parts
jazz,
classical, and
improvisation. Disc one features a sextet that includes trumpeter
Michael Gassman who has been collaborating with
Battaglia for 15 years. The other members of this first ensemble include
Mirco Mariotinni on clarinet, cellist
Aya Shimura, bassist
Salvatore Majore, and drummer
Roberto Dani. The music here is lighter; reflective, melodic even at its moodiest. The opening track
"Canzone di Laura Betti," is a song inspired by
Pasolini's muse, an actress who worked not only with him but also
Bernardo Bertolucci,
Alberto Rosselini Federico Fellini and other great Italian directors. Led so beautifully by the piano, the tune serves the deep lyricism of the truly Italian form of
jazz, cinema music and the
ballads sung by traditional Italian singers, and even
opera arias. The cello lilts in and around the piano as it quietly digs into the lyric line and celebrates it to brushed drums and a simple bassline. This gorgeous piece reflects on the actress in a nearly spiritual manner. Other tunes here reflect poems written by
Pasolini, and the place of actors he worked with, and the fifth cut,
"Fevrar," is named for one of
Pasolini's poems.
Battaglia uses it as an implement for melodic
improvisation on a rural landscape. Sparse, nearly skeletal lyric lines open mysteriously and are commented upon by
Majore's bassline, a tapped bell on a cymbal, and intermittent trumpet lines that last only moments. The droning repetition of the bassline suggests the rhythmic line of a poem even as it opens out onto another musical vista, where it never strays far from the emptiness and elegance of the landscape. The entire disc reflects the aspects of his subject's character, an artist and man for whom tenderness, classicism, romanticism and nostalgia were motivating factors and states of being The second disc is another matter altogether as
Battaglia teams with members of
Louis Sclavis' band --
Dominique Pifarély (violin),
Bruno Chevillon (bass), and
Vincent Courtois (cello) -- along with drummer and percussionist
Michele Rabbia offer a much darker, more improvisational -- and at times tenser -- meditation on less pleasurable aspects of
Pasolini's life and the often radical nature of his work: his troubled relationship to the Roman Church and his radical politics that were truly committed to a working prole (during the student strikes and riots in Italy in 1969 he backed the police over students because the former were true working men and the students "pampered boys," the leftists backed the students) and railed against the kind of materialism that gave way to consumerism and, he claimed, ruined Italian society. This is
chamber music that walks a thin and blurred line between
classical music and
free improvisation: not
free jazz. It courts tension. It is fully engaged, with sometimes-heated dialogue between musicians, but it is also dirge-like in places, brooding and full of uneasy space. It feels like an elegy. Its pieces wind through and around an eight-piece
"Lyria" of shorter works. This reflects both the scenic work of the cinema and the episodic nature of epic Italian
poetry that often ends in tragedy. Here
"Ostia" (named for the beach where
Pasolini was killed) -- the only long work on disc two and its second from last cut -- is full of ambiguity, darkness and open space between the lower register chords of
Battaglia's piano and the alternately mysterious strings. The set ends with a sorrowful, melodic ballad that is as moving as the final cue of a soundtrack as it plays the final credits, the last moments of an
opera that ends in tragedy. It is one that denotes memory, dignity, and loss.
Battaglia has achieved his ambitious aim. His devotion to the work of his subject has moved through him and inhabited him. Not as a ghost, but as a Muse who speaks through his compositions and the truly empathic communication of both these groups. As a true bonus,
Battaglia annotates his liner notes, track by track, exhaustively, offering their sources and inspirations as further information. America may have known
Pasolini as an art house filmmaker; via
Battaglia's
Re: Pasolini, he has become something more, something other, a force of the mythic universe.
Battaglia's work is an epic, and yes, a masterpiece that is a force in and of itself to be reckoned with. It is the high point in an already celebrated career.
~Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
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