Over two years in the making, but finally at the end of this month (or at the very latest, the first week of May) will see the publication of the long-awaited new disc from the Barga trumpeter, Andrea Guzzoletti.
Entitled ” Invisible Cities” the concept album is based around the book “Le città invisibili”, a novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino and features eight piece of music inspired by individual cities from Calvino’s book – Kaleidoscope city, Industrial city, Mirrored city, Toy city, City of God, Terminal city, Underground city and last but not least, Rainbow city. Some of the first CD’s printed will also contain a hidden track, Last city.
Andrea has been joined in this project by two other musicians well known here in Barga – both are members of the Barga Jazz Orchestra and both have played on many occasions at the Barga Jazz club – Roberto Cecchetto – guitar and electronics and Stefano Onorati – keyboard and electronics.
Calvino writes: “…Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts”
So, what does the music sound like ?
Well, we will still have to wait until the disc is available on iTunes or Amazon or maybe until the trio actually give a live concert in Barga.
Watch this space.
Invisible Cities (Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore.
he book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 cities, apparently narrated by Polo.
Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including linguistics and human nature. Not only is the book structured around an interlocking pattern of numbered sections, but the length of each section’s title graphically outlines a continuously oscillating sine wave, or perhaps a city skyline.
The interludes between Khan and Polo are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device, a story with a story, that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories.
The book, because of its approach to the imaginative potentialities of cities, has been used by architects and artists to visualize how cities can be their secret folds, where the human imagination is not necessarily limited by the laws of physics or the limitations of modern urban theory. It offers an alternative approach to thinking about cities, how they are formed and how they function. – source – Wikipedia
Andrea Guzzoletti’s project Electrovisions in the piazza 2007 | bargajazzclub March 2008 |
Click on the link below to hear an interview with Andrea Guzzoletti, recorded this afternoon in which he talks (in Italiano) about his working methods and some of the background behind the making of the music for this project “Invisible Cities”
Andrea Guzzoletti talks about Invisible Cities