The equation is error proof: vision + ideas + courage = a record that
deserved to rotate on our turntable. Endless are the combinations and one
of those is certainly represented by Alea, the work of Andrea Giordano,
subject matter of this review.
Giordano, born in 1995, is an experimental
musician, singer and composer from Cuneo, Italy, who after the degree at
Siena Jazz University went on with a master in jazz and performance at the
Norwegian Academy of Music, where she was a student of Sidsel Endresen and
where she is currently pursuing a bachelor in composition. Alea, a suite
for large mixed ensemble in which Giordano also performs as vocalist and
multi-instrumentalist, is the heartfelt tribute the her friend and mentor,
the italian jazz musician and pedagogue Alessandro Giachero, who died
unexpectedly in 2020, dating from the start of the master degree in Oslo,
where she began to develop songs towards an album of ensemble music. As per
the constituents, she opted for a mix of instruments with similar sounds
and timbres that could blend seamlessly.
Giordano said on Bandcamp that the
tracks, recorded separately at the Norwegian Academy of Music in 2022 and
assembled later, are like separate rooms (“stansias”) within the same
house, each as an individual expression of tension, repetition and
ceremony. Dissonances, fragmented cyclical motives and laments are
rendering overwhelming the dimension of grief and sorrow, along with
shamanic, Native American-like chants that seem sometimes to exorcise the immeasurable pain. Crucial to the project is Giordano’s ongoing research
into the Piedmontese dialect, a Gallo-Romance language primarily spoken in
the Italian northwest region of Piedmont, that is endemic to her native
city of Cuneo. She had previously sung librettos of poetry in the
predominant Piedmontese dialect, a process she describes as “an attempt to
be honest with my roots” and for this record she commissioned Vieri
Cervelli Montel, a composer and friend of both Giordano and Giachero, to
write lyrics in italian that she and Montel then translated together into
her hometown dialect based on her interviews with scholars and family. The
result has much more to do with the musicality of the words than with their
semantic, as Giordano is delivering them in a way totally devoted at the sole
service of the sonic architecture of her work, reminding us sometimes even
the lyricism of Bjork and the great Elizabeth Frazer.
The album’s title has
tripartite origins: it is a reference to the Italian for “to Alessandro,” a
nod to the aleatoric nature of his death and an epithet of the Greek
goddess Athena. The ensemble sees: Andrea Giordano: compositions, voice,
organetto; Alessandra Rombolà: flutes; Cosimo Fiaschi: soprano saxophone;
Ferdinand Schwarz: trumpet; Joel Ring: cello; Kalle Moberg: accordion;
Emanuele Guadagno: guitar; Lara Macrì: harp; Ingrid Hjerpseth: organ;
Christian Meaas Svendsen: double bass; Nicholas Remondino: percussion and
gran cassa; Ingar Zach: percussion, gran cassa and vibrating membranes. We
look forward to see Giordano’s next move.
