Franco D'Andrea

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Francesco "Franco" D'Andrea (born March 8, 1941 in Merano ) is an Italian pianist and composer of modern jazz .

Franco D'Andrea

Life

D'Andrea is self-taught and started playing the piano after having tried trumpet, clarinet, double bass and saxophone. He had his first professional job as a musician in 1963 with the Italian jazz pioneer Nunzio Rotondo at the state radio of the Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana in Rome. In 1964/65 he was a member of Gato Barbieri's band . He was a co-founder of the avant-garde Modern Art Trio , with which he played from 1968 to 1972. The recording of this group in 1970 with Bruno Tommaso and Franco Tonani showed the experimentation with serial music in the style of the early Art Ensemble of Chicago . The music historian Luca Bragalini wrote in 2007: This record remains “an unsurpassed masterpiece of improvisation with serial cells to this day”. For the next five years he toured Europe and the world with the successful and best Italian jazz rock formation Perigeo , and also worked with Mario Schiano ( Original Sins ) and the Saxes Machines formation . At the same time, he was involved in the 1972 Gato Barbieri band on the recording of Bernardo Bertolucci's film soundtrack The Last Tango in Paris .

In 1978 he formed his own trio and in the following years increasingly emerged as a solo pianist. Dialogues with super-ego / 1980 is the name of the first of a total of two dozen solo albums that are created. In the 1980s he turned to more conservative post-bop forms, playing in Aldo Romano's band , as on his ECM album Opening Night from 1981. In 1983 he spent several years so that he could study the polyrhythmic roots of jazz with local musicians Months in Central Africa. On his albums published on the Splasc (h) label , he played with accompanying musicians such as Hein van de Geyn , Aldo Romano and Enrico Rava , Miroslav Vitouš and Daniel Humair ( Earthcake 1991).

In addition, D'Andrea recorded duo albums with musicians such as Lee Konitz , Phil Woods and Dave Liebman . He accompanied the singer Tiziana Ghigliani with a quintet led by Steve Lacy . He also worked with Ernst Reijseger , Slide Hampton , Max Roach , Conte Candoli , Frank Rosolino , Pepper Adams , Johnny Griffin , Jean-Luc Ponty and many Italian musicians.

With his regular line-up since the nineties, the Franco D'Andrea Quartet (Andrea Ayassot saxophone, Aldo Mella double bass, Zeno De Rossi drums), from 2005 he has been presenting concert evenings that merge seamlessly into one another, leading through the extensive repertoire of original compositions without a program , but also include standards. The Italian jazz critic Vincenzo Roggero, for example, writes about the album “Sorapis” (2011): “The search, the experimentation make the compositions something that is constantly changing, an open space where there are solid, clearly recognizable structures within which the four musicians move curiously and unpredictably ”. Guest musicians like Dave Douglas and Han Bennink complement the line-up of his band on tours 2011–12. In 2006 Andreas Pichler made the documentary Franco D'Andrea - Jazz Pianist about his life and work.

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In the opinion of Richard Cook and Brian Morton, the Airegin production, made with Roberto Gatto and Giovanni Tommaso , is one of D'Andreas best albums, with interpretations from the jazz repertoire such as Epistrophy , Doxy or Bill Evans' Blue in Green , Tommaso's composition My Dear One and D. 'Andreas Things Called . In 1989 Chromatic Phrygian was created with a trio , and in 1996 the solo album 3 Lines , which took up the idea of ​​Bill Evans on his Conversations with Myself to accompany himself on several audio tracks. In 2001 he recorded a set of eight piano solo albums for Philology . In total he has recorded well over 200 long-playing records and CDs.

D'Andrea is considered a senior among Italian post-bop musicians. As jazz journalists Arrigo Polillo and Gian Carlo Roncaglia noted, it was above all Franco D'Andrea who, along with Enrico Rava, found the most acclaim among jazz critics in Italy in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. D'Andreas role models include such diverse musicians as James P. Johnson , Monk and Tristano ; further inspiration comes from the work of Mingus , Miles Davis, and Coltrane . His work is one of the “most unique of European jazz”, writes the famous Italian musicologist Stefano Zenni.

D'Andrea composed many titles. Commissioned by the theater in Cagliari , he worked with the contemporary composer Luca Francesconi and the African percussionist Fode Voula . D'Andrea is stylistically one of the most diverse European pianists and has mastered a large part of the jazz idioms. In this regard, the Rough Guide Jazz writes that D'Andrea has developed "into a virtuoso musician with a mercurial technique and a relaxed attitude towards styles and epochs - from stride piano to bebop , from jazz-rock ( fusion ) to total abstraction".

D'Andrea has been a didactic teacher for decades and also holds master classes or improvisation classes internationally (Thelma Yellin High School of Arts / Tel Aviv, Association pour l'encouragement de la musique improvisée / Geneva). At the end of the 1970s he was one of the initiators of the Siena Jazz Academy, where he still teaches summer courses to this day. From 1986 he also taught for ten years at the “Centro di professione musica” in Milan. From 1993 he held the jazz chair at the “FABonporti” Conservatory in Trento for 13 years. Since 2002 he has also built up the Central European Jazz Academy Merano together with Ewald Kontschieder .

Awards

In addition to various honors and prizes, he has repeatedly won the award for the best recording of the year in Italy since 1982 (most recently in 2012 for "Traditions and Clusters" and 2018 for "Intervals I") or the title of jazz musician of the year (2008, 2013, 2014 , 2015, 2016, 2018) and the Jazz Group of the Year (F. D'Andrea Sextet 2014), awarded by jazz critics and the Italian journal Musica Jazz . In January 2011, the French Academie du Jazz in Paris honored D'Andreas' life's work with the Prix ​​du Musicien Européen . In 2011 he also received the honorary prize of the Italian Jazz Awards " Luca Flores ".

In 2016 he received honorary citizenship of the city of Merano .

Discographic notes

  • Modern Art Trio (Dejavu 2008, new edition of the Vedette LP from 1970)
  • Dialogues with super-ego / Es Solo (Red Records, 1980)
  • No Idea of ​​Time (Red, 1983) with Mark Helias , Barry Altschul
  • Chromatic Phrygian ( yvp music , 1989)
  • Airegin (Red, 1991)
  • Inside Cole Porter (Red, 1996) with Lee Konitz
  • Jobim (Philology, 1997)
  • Angel Eyes (Philology, 1999) with Larry Smith
  • Eleven (Via Veneto Jazz 2000) with Steven Bernstein
  • Solo 5 - Duke (Philology, 2001) solo
  • Magicians at Work (Philology, 2002)
  • I Love You So Much It Hurts (Winter & Winter, 2002) with Ernst Reijseger
  • Plays Monk - Live At Metastasio Jazz (Philology, 2003)
  • Creole Rhapsody: D.Ellington (3 CD, Philology, 2005)
  • The Siena Concert (Blue Note 2008)
  • Sorapis (El Gallo Rojo, 2011)
  • Traditions and Clusters (El Gallo Rojo, 2012)
  • Today solo album (El Gallo Rojo, 2013)
  • Monk and The Time Machine (El Gallo Rojo, 2014)
  • Intervals I (Parco della Musica Records, 2018) with the Franco D'Andrea Octet

Publications

  • 26 compositions , Crepuscule, Milano 1982
  • Enciclopedia comparata delle scale e degli accordi (with Attilio Zanchi ), Didactic series of the Centro Professione Musica, Carisch, Milano, 1992
  • Dall'Africa allo swing - la poliritmia nel linguaggio Jazz , didactic video, Carisch, Milano, 1996
  • Aree intervallari (with Luigi Ranghino), Volontè & Co, 2011

Lexical entries

literature

  • Franco D'Andrea Jazz pianist , biography by Andreas Pichler, Miramonte Film 2006
  • Ewald Kontschieder: Approaching a musician prince . Franco D'Andrea Jazz pianist at 65th . In: kulturlemente. Journal for Current Issues , Bozen 2006, p. 10f
  • Francesco Carta: Franco D'Andrea. Profumo di swing , Edizioni Siena Jazz 2007
  • Franco D'Andrea Jazz Affair. In: “Jazzit. Jazz Magazin “, D'Andrea focus number, March / April 2010, pp. 62–111

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Luca Bragalini: I segreti del jazz. Una guida all'ascolto , 2007, p. 103
  2. ↑ Stefano Zenni: Storia del jazz. Una prospettiva global, Nuovi Equilibri 2012, p. 518
  3. ^ Jazz rock group Perigeo. en: Perigeo
  4. ↑ Valerio Prigotti: “Piano Solo”, in: “Jazzit”, March / April 2010, pp. 91–96
  5. ↑ Cook / Morton rated the album as well as the work Chromatic Phrygian (1989) with the highest rating of four stars
  6. ^ "Musica Jazz", Top Jazz '82, 1/1982, p. 26f
  7. ↑ quoted from: Gian Carlo Roncaglia: "Italia Jazz oggi", 1995, p. 99 and p. 105
  8. ↑ Stefano Zenni: Storia del jazz. Una prospettiva global, Nuovi Equilibri 2012, p. 473
  9. ^ Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather & Brian Priestley: "Rough Guide Jazz," 1999, p. 146
  10. ↑ Tel Aviv School of Art. http://www.thelma-yellin.co.il/135
  11. ↑ AMR Jazz and IMporation School Geneva. http://www.amr-geneve.ch/
  12. ^ Co-founder of the Siena Jazz Academy. Time online: sounds from the fortress . Retrieved April 1, 2012
  13. ^ Website of the Milan Music School. http://www.centroprofessionemusica.it/
  14. ↑ Trento Conservatory. Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.conservatorio.tn.it
personal data
SURNAME D'Andrea, Franco
ALTERNATIVE NAMES D'Andrea, Francesco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Meran