ZohoMusic.com - Latin Jazz With A New York Vibe

On Marco Pignataro’s previous ZOHO album, Almas Antiguas – an acclaimed 2018 encounter with old masters Alan Pasqua, Eddie Gomez and Adam Cruz – the Bologna-bred master saxophonist-composer celebrated his Mediterranean roots with a program that told, as he put it then, “a story of love” in notes and tones.

On Awakening, which documents a virtual live concert at Boston’s GBH Fraser Studio in July 2021, sponsored by JazzBoston, Pignataro meditates on the eternal subject of romantic love from a different angle. He showcases another stream of artistic expression, scripting a narrative that merges his intensely contemplative, metaphor-rich English-language poems with iconic songs from the canons of pop music from America and the British Isles and original material. It’s cliche to call presentations like this “beyond category,” but that’s what Awakening is. That said, if an editor demanded a description, I’d call the proceedings highest-level chamber jazz, lyrical, melody-rich, harmonically sophisticated, masterfully executed, containing elements drawn from classical, gospel and opera, animated by a sensibility that embodies Wayne Shorter’s manifesto, “the past is the flashlight for the future.”

Shorter’s aesthetics are the lodestar of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute (BGJI) at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where Pignataro has served as Managing Director since 2009. With help from BGJI alumnus Chase Morrin, he scored the music for a multi-generational, inter-racial group of Berklee colleagues – iconic pianist-composer Kenny Werner, then 69, who contributes his Grammy-winning song, Inspiration; pellucidly soulful 30-something vocalist Nadia Washington, who also contributes on guitar; and 20+ bassist-vocalist Devon Gates, who harmonizes divinely with Nadia and anchors the flow with resonant tone and unfailing beat.

“On Almas Antiguas I saw myself as much a singer as a saxophone player, and here I’ve harmonized as the third voice, not just two voices and a saxophone,” Pignataro says. “I want to return to the old tradition of “singing" beautiful melodies through the horn, as master story tellers such as Lester Young and Stan Getz did. Kenny’s ability to improvise a palette of harmony and colors and his vast experience in drummer-less duo settings with so many singers and saxophonists – and with Toots Thielemans – makes him the perfect pianist for this group.”

You’ll find the text of each poem in the booklet jacket; it seems redundant to opine much on the tracks – anyway, Pignataro strives to create “ambiguity” in his artistic expression. But there are metaphysical threads. Stevie Wonder’s Send One Your Love, which Washington OWNS, reminds Marco of the Italian poet Alda Merini who said, “romanticism is not about giving roses but cultivating roses.” Stand By Me reflects “importance of love and hope” during the turbulent chaos of the Covid era. The original arrangement transforms the forgotten 70s anthem Alone Again (addressed here in 7/4) into a stark account of “total loss.”

Pignataro regards his poem, I Caught A Reflection of Me, as a “hymn to romantic love & existential love, or love for God, where you experience this sense of love that takes your breath away, so intense, so transformational that transcends you from the reality.” The theme of existential love, in his view, infuses the lyric of John Lennon’s Because – “the idea of Nature and God, of total abandonment to a bigger love, our capacity to connect to this energy.”

“I see myself as a Neoromantic,” he says. “I feel that a lot of modern jazz is moving away from introspection, from using lyrical melodies as a way of telling human stories. Here and on Almas Antiguas, I deliberately take a different direction. I’m trying not to repeat anything that has been done, and create a personal sound with these timeless ideas, with music that has little to do with what everybody else is doing. Personally, I see myself as a storyteller and as a musician, this is what really inspires me.”
Ted Panken

“I think it is time to acknowledge that Marco’s music has reached the level of his heart”.
Kenny Werner

Awakening! What is the breaking point of solitude? The essence of life as a single soul roaming through herds of others, as in a congested highway where hundreds of people are imprisoned in the same space without ever connecting, unless by randomness of glances, waves, insults or accidents. The ocean suggests a different image, where water engulfs and connects lands and underworlds, skies and shores, salt and sand, days and nights, stars and earth.

Whereas we are all one entity; whereas our spirits melt in an ever-changing counterpoint of souls, creating spontaneous harmonies full of incomprehensible and astoundingly mysterious consonances and dissonances, tones and shapes, tensions and releases and unimaginable joys and sorrows. Each chord and tone having a sense only in relation to what chords and tones preceded and follows next; yet, never just quite complete in itself -no matter how lush or unique.

As the “Master Composer”, our Creator knows why and how to shape His masterpiece, unknowingly from its notes forming chords and melodies that will resonate infinitely with each other, even when they will be not sharing the same measures, cadences or even key centers. I am stubbornly certain that life itself is God’s most breathtaking and bittesweet love song ever made. That is how I wish my music to sound like.

Marco Pignataro

Resilience of Light
Resilience of light, channeling each breath and memory through the displacement of place and time. Each season passing brings back the same rain and the same wind to the same eternal ocean of truth. Sleep walking across the maze of translucent clouds, the days feel weary from searching and falling. Be still as we trace our spirits through the valley of the ancient melody. The light doesn’t ever falter, but I don’t recognize the surroundings anymore; I will keep holding your hand since I’m too afraid to let go.

Naked Absence
I nested a bright rainbow
on a vessel made of shells
and watched it sail away
until all I could glimpse
was the lonely reflection
of its naked absence

Farfallina (Little Butterfly)
Are you gliding, butterfly?
you draw circles in my mind
You left a winter behind
A long and painful goodbye
And you flew away in the sky
Butterfly
Are you hiding, butterfly?
Are your wings too sore to fly?
Those dreams we shared in the clouds
Where we could never be found
Are now still a reason to cry?