The pianist and composer from Ferrara, Italy, talks in this interview about his latest musical effort: ‘Tactile’, inspired by the search for a physical perception of the sound dimension, played in a trio with bassist Alessandro Fedrigo and drummer Luca Colussi. This is his fourth album as leader and was recorded in the prestigious Artesuono Recording studio of award-winning sound engineer Stefano Amerio.
Musically you are quite crossover, to make it easier for our readers to understand, how would you define your music, even though labels leave time to find?
It’s quite difficult to self-define, I definitely put the word ‘jazz’ in it in the sense of an extemporary and creative approach to performance, inside there are so many influences from my life that may seem to be seemingly at odds, but I hear them all. Sometimes I’ve been called ‘Avant-Garde’ but maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Would I say ‘Contemporary Jazz’? Reiterating that yes, labels leave time to be found.
How formative do you think your experience in the El Gallo Rojo collective has been? And how valuable in your training and the building of your background is the collaboration with the Adam Rapa Quartet?
When I recorded ‘Brian Had a Little Plate’ with the musicians of the then nascent El Gallo Rojo, I was approaching a musical world that was new to me in terms of the potential, freedom and courage that was being brought into play. I still had to understand and internalise many things, but the collaboration with Danilo, Max, Francesco and Simone, who already had much broader horizons than mine, opened my mind and broadened my creative vision, and I still thank them for this ‘initiation’.
I have worked with Adam Rapa for many years and our collaboration and friendship has led us both to grow, we have brought our very different musical backgrounds to each other until we have found a common ground. Adam comes from the American tradition of the Drum Corps, brass bands, musicals and compositional and performing excellence, but has a great drive towards a more fluid and ‘dirty’ musical and improvisational world. In many years of collaboration we have touched many different territories and this latest quartet with Raphael Pannier and Jeremy Bruyère is the beginning of a synthesis of lyricism, freedom and compositional precision with great potential that I still think has great margins for growth, but we have been talking about going into the studio to record for a few years now.
Tell us about your latest album, ‘Tactile’, just released with a new line-up?
The idea for Tactile came unexpectedly but with a clear urgency on the part of all three of us. I had recently moved from Milan to Udine and the meeting with Luca and Alessandro was almost fortuitous. We immediately realised there was potential and things followed one another with surprising fluidity and speed, absolutely natural, so much so that I had to give myself a certain discipline to keep up with the flow of events: songwriting, arrangements, recording the first demos, organising the presentation tour in Japan, audio video editing and so on. For me, it was a lesson, I realised that when the ‘fertile ground’ is there to make things work, then they move on their own feet, at a pace that is also surprisingly faster than you think, but that requires no effort, just going with the flow and staying awake and active. It was the same with the collaboration with Stefano Amerio: it only took a few, clear words to decide to work together on the project. From when we first talked about it to when we had the master ready, only a few months passed.
After a long apprenticeship in 2013, you finally released your first work as a trio leader, ‘Mana’. What do you remember about that experience and how decisive was it in your musical evolution?
A lot happened during that period that made me grow, musically and inwardly. It was a period full of collaborations in many different fields, from the most mainstream to fusion, to free jazz. In this organic chaos I began to glimpse my own path and then came a catalyst, the meeting with Israel Varela, one of those people who act as ‘spiritual amplifiers’ and make things and the people they collaborate with grow. Then it just clicked for me, something told me ‘it can be done’ and off I went: I wrote and arranged everything in less than a month and made auditions that I sent to Israel with what exactly would have been the record, verbatim. Even then it cost me almost no effort, I was driven by a playful impulse, as if I finally had the project of a little toy of my own to work on with the ideal musicians for that project, which Israel and Ivo understood perfectly.
In 2015, your second album ‘Symbiont’, in which you are joined by Danilo Gallo and Michele Salgarello, came on the market and was ranked among the best albums of 2015, according to ‘The Jazz Critique Magazine’. How is it different from your debut album?
Actually Mana and Symbiont were born almost at the same time, I released Symbiont some time later for practical matters. It all started when Danilo moved near Milan, around the same time I met Israel. Danilo and I hadn’t played together since Rootless and Gallo Rojo. As it happened now with Tactile, we simply set up in the studio to play and we saw that it worked, I called Michele, whom I did not know personally but instinctively seemed the right person for that trio, for his culture, his listening and his approach, and so it was. Compared to Mana, it is a more choral work, more organic and in a certain sense more extreme. Whereas Mana I had written and arranged from top to bottom and had a precise idea of each track from the beginning, in Symbiont I tried to bring back the fluidity and freedom I had known with Rootless, with Francesco Cusa, with Tan T’Ien, in a project that still had some written structure. Danilo is a musician with broad shoulders, he carries ‘weight’, personality and courage, as does Michele. For this project, I put myself in their tracks, trusting their experience.
What are the changes from the 2018 album ‘Human See, Human Do’, made with Massimiliano Milesi on sax, Danilo Gallo on double bass and Alessandro Rossi on drums. How does the change in line-up affect the mood of your records in your opinion?
The quartet of Human See, Human Do was born when I was invited in 2017 to the festival in Kragujevac, Serbia. At that time I had no line-up of my own and was only working as a sideman. I was already very good friends with Alessandro Rossi from the days of Zancle with Serena Ferrara and the tour in China, I was already hanging out and playing a lot with Milesi, Boggio Ferraris and the guys from UR Records. The decision to call this line-up was dictated by a commonality of cultural references and approach to music, but also by a personal complicity, an atmosphere of ‘locker room’ friendship, there was energy and a desire to be together that was cemented during the trip to Serbia. As has happened to me many times before, the playful commonality that comes from cultural and human sharing becomes artistic synergy. When the playfulness and complicity in joking then translate into interplay and musical energy, then the group has a distinct sound and meaning worth listening to. A four-piece line-up with the addition of the saxophone allows me to have a fuller and more impactful sound, almost rock-like, and to push further on the concept of ‘organised chaos’ that characterises a bit of all my stuff, where everyone plays against each other at the same game, according to broad but precise rules.
Yours is a 20-year activity, you have done many things, but if you had to explain who Luca Dell’Anna is with four adjectives, which would you use?
Omnivorous, receptive, stubborn, enthusiastic – … it sounds a bit strange to me, but maybe they can work.
What stylistic differences are there in your playing in the transition from piano to Hammond?
I grew up listening to a lot of music, even far from jazz, so for me the Hammond is both Jimmy Smith and John Lord, both James Taylor Quartet and Larry Goldings. I don’t call myself a Hammondist because I feel like I am desecrating a temple where ‘the real ones’ keep secrets that I have never really dedicated myself to, until now. In the trios of Walter Calloni and Francesco Cusa, I learnt to ‘throw myself’ without restrictions and make the sound work according to the energy of the group. If I had to look for differences, I would say that definitely on the hammond my funk-rock soul emerges and I tend to push harder on the accelerator. But I realise what I can get out of the Hammond is the tip of an iceberg, among the things I hope to be able to do sooner or later, I definitely want to go deeper and become more ‘real’.
You are an artist who really likes collaborations and you have a hectic concert schedule, the length and breadth of the world. Tell us about the different appreciation of your music in places with such distant cultures as Japan, Denmark, Eastern Europe, Portugal. Not everyone, I imagine, reacts in the same way, however much music is a universal language.
In my opinion, once again the key is the playful aspect, the fun. The reason why I feel lucky to be a musician is precisely because I can play, share, ‘bicker’ on stage with the other musicians and make the audience feel it. When this comes through and is transmitted then the audience becomes part of the exchange and ‘something’ is really created. I have seen this happen at all latitudes, regardless of how culturally different the approach to the event-music as a cultural institution was, to be treated in the beginning with more or less deference: I let you imagine the difference in initial approach of the Japanese audience from the Spanish, or the Ethiopian. The thing that then repays you is to see when these differences melt away and the music reveals its aspect as a playful, truly universal language.
Do you take a different approach when writing your studio records than when composing soundtracks?
I realise that I often take a different approach, although in a way I shouldn’t. Let me explain: in my opinion, music that works always paints a scene. Music that works best is music that has pictorial, narrative, evocative potential. In this sense, to work on soundtracks I put myself in a more ‘pure’ state, completely at the service of the image and the story, using harmony, melody and technical tricks as tools to convey a pictorial message. I should maintain this attitude in composing all kinds of music, even that of my studio records, but sometimes abstract intellectualism risks taking over. But I am working on it and I think I have approached it with Tactile more than in the past.
In conclusion, after all these international collaborations, how much ‘Italian’ remains in you, would you call yourself a musically cosmopolitan artist?
Definitely yes, indeed I think I experience a certain detachment from my musical roots that we Italians suffer perhaps more than others. Perhaps because we are cosmopolitans in spirit or perhaps because we have so many different traditions and are not one ‘people’. But I am thinking of the close and still living relationship that the Argentinians have with their traditional music, for example, or the Ethiopians. I am talking about young people, about musical scenes that are still vibrant and active, carrying on musical traditions that have been alive for centuries. But this is also an advantage from my point of view: I have always consumed and enjoyed enormously different musical languages, and I have been equally enthusiastic about all of them. If something distinctly Italian can be heard in my pianism or my music, perhaps a Japanese person will be able to tell me better. I am fine as I am, equal and equally hungry for different music and energies. Perhaps (I hope) all this can be heard in my music.
