ROBERTO BONATI MADREPERLA TRIO “Parfois la nuit”

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ARTIST

Roberto Bonati Madreperla Trio

ALBUM TITLE

“Parfois la nuit”

LABEL

Parma frontiere

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“Sometimes the night is difficult. Its colours, its lights, its joyful darkness defy understanding. Sometimes the night is suspended, mysterious, forever unknown.”

These words provide the ideal gateway into the magical world created by Roberto Bonati and offer a key to understanding what lies behind his latest work, appropriately entitled Parfois la nuit.

Joined by the Madreperla Trio – a chamber-like, drumless ensemble featuring Luca Perciballi on guitar and live electronics and Gabriele Fava on soprano and tenor saxophones – the Emilian bassist, composer and conductor leads us through the fourteen chapters of a suite that is constantly shifting and never predictable.

It is a journey in which wakefulness and dreams – or, perhaps more accurately, consciousness and the unconscious – meet and overlap. Dreamlike fragments of a discourse on love, as in “Dream#1 Danza d’amore”, alternate with unsettling apparitions in the Freudian sense of the term, as in “Dream#5 Weird Meetings”.

The dialogue between Bonati and his fellow travellers remains consistently open, articulate and free from predictability. It unfolds within a conception of jazz as an “open work”, in the sense theorised by Umberto Eco, where multiple musical languages converge: echoes of folk and vernacular traditions in pieces such as “Rouge” and “Folk”; excursions into contemporary music, as heard in the brief “Dream#3 The Fall”; moments of radical improvisation, such as “Dream#4 The Fight”; and compositions that draw on minimalist aesthetics, including the title piece “Madreperla”.

The influence of Bonati’s long-standing relationship with the Norwegian Academy of Music and the wider Northern European scene is unmistakable. Fava’s saxophone sound, particularly on soprano, often evokes Jan Garbarek, while Perciballi’s guitar moves between the acidic sonorities of Terje Rypdal and the spacious harmonic landscapes associated with Bill Frisell.

This nocturnal album concludes as it began, completing an ideal circle. The closing piece, “May Love”, serves as a synthesis of the album’s various identities, a place where war and peace, fear and trust, unease and serenity ultimately find a point of convergence.

Ivo Franchi

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