MoonJune 2016
The Great Jazz Gig In The Sky
When lunatics are on the grass: unhinged reading of PINK FLOYD’s pinnacle by irreverently imaginative Italians.
There’s been a lot of takes on “The Dark Side Of The Moon” – up to bluegrass and dub ones – but, while trying to appropriate the 1973 monument, most of its interpreters tend to forget the album’s underlying theme of madness. And that’s what this trio capture brilliantly here, “in a very natural and simple way,” as singer Boris Savoldelli explains, by delivering the whole record live in a studio and exploring the classic’s strangest tangents. With vocals made deliberately strident – and fed through an old pre-amp from Abbey Road Studios for legacy’s sake – original song structures turn to FX-fuzzy mirages where Raffaele Casarano’s sax and Marco Bardoscia’s contrabass clash and mingle.
From the chthonic vibes of “Breathe” to the vaudeville romp through “Eclipse” a sense of sadness shoots through increasingly unrecognizable, yet still familiar, pieces which play games with the listener’s mind – never more so than in the unhurriedly vigorous “Brain Damage” – yet manage to not turn into nightmares. If “Time” is creepy, it’s the very nature of a temporal flow whose sizzling fear flutters in the tight space between elegiac brass and sinister strings, the place haunted with weird whispers, until the title track’s pulse and voice take a spaced-out walk on the wild side. “Us And Them” could be frighteningly lonesome as well, had Dewa Budjana not poured a hymnal guitar in its vortex – the only later addition to the suite – and upped the blissful craziness of the soundscape.
The result is great, indeed, the idea of the original purveyed perfectly. Syd would’ve approved.
****3/4
