Alex Sipiagin, DayDream review

‘So I walked through endless fields of many shades of green. Still there’s shades I wish to see before I’ll be home at last’
– from the lyrics of ‘Home at Last’

There are precious few details about this latest from Alex Sipiagin. I hesitate to assume too much given the lack of any hard and fast information.

But I do like it a good deal. It’s a different kind of Sipiagin album that isn’t as strictly hard bop as the trumpeter can be. But there’s plenty of modal jazz feeling and an endearing Norma Winstone-esque side to the vocals like the icing on a cake of several layers.

Collaborators of the tonally superb trumpet icon’s include singers Giuditta Franco and Marta Frigo, pianist Diego Albini, guitarist Francesco Faro, bassists Francesco Bordignon and Giuseppe Vitale and drummer Giuseppe Salime. Its unego-laden diffidence that melts away and the manner in which its bluesily noir harmonic flourishes and deft group circling of the various emblematic themes unfurl are a super power.

Day Dream players group shot photo: YouTube still. Sipiagin is second from the right

A studio album recorded in June last year in the Italian Veneto region city of Bassano Del Grappa, it’s full of a youthful spirit and a naive, infectiously sentimental at times folk-y quality shaped by good ideas and a questing urge. There is no ludicrous machismo anywhere – a factor refreshing in itself – on this thoughtful affair that has the air of an experiment about it, one where most of the elements make sense and as a listener you feel kind of satisfied by the spell that has been created. The Franco and Frigo concord of sweet sounds blended on ‘Purple or Green’ certainly creates its own world.

Sipiagin has another new album out next month on the Dutch Criss Cross Jazz label called Reverberations again recorded in Bassano del Grappa, this upcoming recording dates back to November last year.

Its line-up includes Englishmen Will Vinson & John Escreet, Makar Novikov, Donald Edwards – whose stickmanship we liked a whole load on Conrad Herwig’s A Jones for Bones Tones – and Lyle Mays’ niece, singer Aubrey Johnson. Reverberations numbers include Sipiagin tunes, Mingus, Strayhorn, McCoy Tyner and Ellington classics.