Enrico Pieranunzi “Improclassica”

“I am large, I contain multitudes,” wrote the poet Walt Whitman. The line was later quoted by Bob Dylan on Rough and Rowdy Ways, certainly not by chance. Perhaps such a titanic self-definition does not quite fit Enrico Pieranunzi. Yet when it comes to multiplicity, the Roman pianist – unquestionably one of the leading figures on today’s European and international jazz scenes, and currently enjoying a particularly fertile creative phase – would likely feel close to the concluding reflections of Italo Calvino’s Multiplicity, the final chapter of Six Memos for the Next Millennium. In his 1985 testament, Calvino writes: “Who are we, who is each of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, readings, and imaginings? Every life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a sample book of styles, where everything can be continually reshuffled and rearranged in every possible way.” Returning to Pieranunzi, one could […]