Gianluigi Trovesi & Gianni Coscia

“Trovesi and Coscia create the score for running away with the circus, wandering the countryside, or letting the evening slip into night. Their music is a balm.” - Jazz Times

As jazz moves into its second century, its regional accents are becoming ever more pronounced; as it becomes a music for the world in the truest sense, notions of locality, history and folklore play an increasingly important role.

Italy, with its free spirited jazz and evocative folk is a case in point, and Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia are two of its most venerable musicians. For Gianni Coscia and his accordion, or fisarmonica, its a lineage that stretches back to the 50s, working with visiting Americans like Joe Venuti and Bud Freeman. The freewheeling Trovesi, one of the world's great champions of the bass clarinet, has happily skirted the avant garde with the Instabile Orchestra, while also collaborating with musicians like Kenny Wheeler, Steve Lacy, Michel Portal and Enrico Rava. Now, it is their own music that these two old friends from Milan turn thier attention.

Cerco di Cibo, their 2000 release for ECM, has drawn legions of admirers, including Umberto Eco, for its charmed evocation of the Italian landscape, physical and otherwise. Songs are the catalyst for their special chemistry, whether it be mazurkas, waltzes and tangos, the Mediterannean folk melodies of their youth or the film music of Morricone and Carpi. These springboards for their haunting evocations of their native land give ample scope to showcase a musical language that is both contemporary and nostalgic, humorous and poignant, emboldened with the spirit of sprezzatura.Or, as Umberto Eco put it:

"this then is a way to add a popular dimension to cultivated music, and a cultivated dimension to popular music. So there's no need to worry which temple we should place them in. On a street corner, or in a concert hall, they would feel at home just the same".