MoonJune 2024
Elegiac magic from jazz trumpeter whose licks put strange energy into new-age-tinged aural imagery.
I Shin Den Shin
“Moment” and “instant” seem to mean the same thing but “momentous” and “instantaneous” are not synonyms – at least, until this Milanese artist and a few kindred spirits found themselves in a studio with some spare time left over after another session had been finished and decided it was about time Luca Calabrese added a first solo album to his four-decade-long discography. Fifteen minutes later, the little ensemble started to play, and in less than an hour and a half “I Shin Den Shin” burst into existence. Over the years, the Italian musician recorded with such different artists as Cecil Taylor and Richard Barbieri, most recently on "Under A Spell" from 2021, yet the trumpeter hardly ever trusted his ideas to a fantastic array of intense guitarists, although Markus Reuter, Mark Wingfield, Alexander Dowerk and Nguyên Lê spectacularly restrained their stringed assault in favor of fabulous yearning that fills the six mini-epics on offer.
Aligning their elegiac performances with the titular concept of mutual understanding on an unspoken, feelings-based level, the quintet paint a series of deeply moving pictures here, where Luca’s melodic lines are drenched in dynamic beauty of the soundscapes which the fingers of his friends sculpt with a great degree of empathy. So while opener “Dissolution” comes across as a slightly menacing tune, its Eastern motifs keep impetus going well beyond amorphic gloom emerging from the contrast of glimmering background and muscular twang before scintillating particles merge into something monumental, if still magnificently sparse. And if “Appointment With The Truth” projects nuanced cinematic abstractness between Calabrese’s delicate, albeit relentless, blows that gradually bust the listener’s stereo perspective, “A New Reality” takes improvisatory flights to rare-air heights for brass overdubs to draw lightning strikes over a quieter effervescence of percussive flashes, and “Pure Mind (Without A Body)” relies on sonic effects and resonant notes to separate bottom end from celestial chime – unlike “Heart To Heart” whose balladry is adventurously stunning in each smallest detail.
And then, there’s a special sort of spirituality lurking in the hypnotic “Magnetic Soul” that winds it all down in a sunset-like, subdued manner and leaves the audience begging for more raptures. Yet this much is mutually understood for sure.
*****
