SONB

Liner Notes

Tiziana Ghiglioni is here in quest of four objects ("an old one, a new one, a borrowed one, a blue one"; we don't know whether the latter will be sad or just bright sky-blue). They are magic objects, warding off ill luck and surrounding her in the texture of the album as in a matriarchal kitchen or in the cave of a sibyl.

Her group, too, is composed of four musicians: apart from her, Umberto Petrin, Attilio Zanchi and Tiziano Tononi, all generously exposed in a record that shows once again that the singer is not affected by the desire to be always in the limelight. And the group repays her with a sound of rare unitary intensity.

Four exceptional guests support the quartet: Steve Lacy, Enrico Rava, Giancarlo Schiaffini (who had already played with Tiziana in other records, respectively in 1986, 1987 and 1989) and Gianluigi Trovesi. Her voice finds a new and original way to relate to each of them, sometimes dramatically, sometimes merrily, showing the cleverness of all the choices.

The authors of the tunes are four as well, and - significantly - they are four living contemporary jazzmen; no more standards and "classics" and the suspicion of a dusty rhetoric. Mal Waldron, Horace Silver, Ornette Coleman and - once more - Steve Lacy, here listed in order of birth, between 1925 and 1934, represent the open generation that rose in the fifties to turn jazz into a music without fixed stylistic reference points.

The singer, born in that same period, bears this variety of stimuli in her sensibility, and of course she tries to further mature them. Thus in the ten pieces of the album we can meet all sorts of musical approach, from enigmatic sketches (Una Muy Bonita) to complex collective elaborations (Art, Street Woman), through more canonical improvisations (where the sound of her voice is still amazing) and Lacy's embroidered melodies. A record that summarizes, with great maturity, all of Tiziana Ghiglioni's progress up to now. She is a singer, but above all a true leader.

Claudio Sessa (liner notes)