Last reviewed in these pages in 2014 when Tǔk Music released a Fresu quintet album, an old school Lee Morgan-grounded type of record in the main as it turned out. The idiom here is so different it’s not worth comparing like-with-like the Sardinian appearing with bandoneonist Daniele di Bonaventura on their latest collaboration after an earlier project involving singers.
It is worth bearing in mind that on ECM Dino Saluzzi, who turns 80 in May, is the bandoneon king but the label might just have a young pretender for the future in the Fermo-born player on this set of original ballads, improvisations, the pair even embracing a Puccini theme from La Bohème and including ‘O que será’ by Chico Buarque among the selections the setting of the latter allowing a segue into Chilean resistance song ‘El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.’
Recorded in May 2014 in Lugano hearing di Bonaventura you think instinctively of Piazzolla even though there is no Piazzolla music here and you think of Saluzzi via that thought process even though the Italian’s style is less macho and raw than Saluzzi’s but no less compelling. It’s the interweaving that matters in the duo interplay, the intimacy of the setting exploited perfectly. Here there is a melodic continuum on a delightful album where there are no beginnings, the title track right at the conclusion providing the only ending. SG
Paolo Fresu and Daniele di Bonaventura, above. The photo is a still from the Wenn aus dem Himmel documentary by Fabrizio Ferraro
The UK and Ireland release of In Maggiore is 23 March