‘Flowers and Storms’ is the new album by the Danyart New Quartet, the ensemble of Sardinian saxophonist Daniele Ricciu with Simone Sassu on piano, Lorenzo Sabatini on double bass and Antonio Argiolas on drums. The album cover puts us in front of a gloomy picture of wild thistle flowers that do not bode well (if these are the flowers that await us, who knows the storms…).
In truth, if by flowers one can mean the clear melodic lines of the saxophone, listening proves to be far more pleasant than a bunch of thistles. And the album, which opens immediately with a fine melodic line, is full of beautiful melodic and singable cues (the leader calls himself a ‘songwriter without words’).
The title of the album, the dichotomy between flowers and storms, should introduce us to the ‘contrasting atmospheres’ of the music, to the dual mood we will find within it. The dedication is also twofold (to Wayne Shorter and Gino Strada) and perhaps helps us better interpret the work as a whole. The two guiding Virgilian presences could be the inspiration for the album’s art and political tracks (politics, understood in the broadest sense as humanitarian, social commitment, etc.). Many artists, in the most diverse fields of art, are tempted by this challenge: to find the equation between art and politics. This is a risky business because politics can manage to make even art boring. But jazz is known to be a genre where political and social battles have taken place with excellent artistic results. In this case, the double inspiration does not produce a unified work, art and politics do not mix well. In short, it is an album with two distinct souls.
And politics in this case inspires the best tracks. Not so much for political reasons as because the album’s ‘storms’ mood is best expressed in the politically inspired tracks such as Love Nature and Utopian World Peace.
The ‘flowers’ mood of the album can be found in the tender, melodically unfolding, almost singer-songwriter ballads: the unbalanced ‘Waltz of Bad Luck’ (beautiful dialogue between drums, piano and double bass) and the nocturnal serenade ‘Dania’ (lyrical monologue for saxophone).The eponymous track, on the other hand, is, like the album itself, torn inside between the mood ‘flowers’ (a first part made up of structure, melody and narration) and the central irrational upheaval of the mood ‘storms’ (but more than an upheaval, it is a brief digression from the atonal avant-garde).It is a beautiful and clean sound, technically refined and studied (the ensemble enhances the melodic inventions of the leader), but it is also too calculated.It perhaps lacks that mad, furious and somewhat sanguine pathos that I would expect from a jazz work.
Giovanni Baleani
