Pluck Excalibur from the stone. Turns out that Alianti is something of an Arthursian legend in the making. But it will not be a surprise to anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of the aesthetics and ability of English trumpeter/flugel wizard Tom Arthurs.
His classic Postcards From Pushkin (Babel, 2012) like this new duo recording with Italian pianist Simone Locarni is an intimate trumpet/flugel dialogue with piano. In the Pushkin case it was with the John Taylor influenced Leicester pianist Richard Fairhurst. These invisible threads weave a tapesty of flickering shadowplay and a plangent wash of colour and emotion encoded within their abstract tonalities.
You get a sense of continuum, an osmosis of intent and philosophy that goes back to a definite well of inspiration. The album title means translated from the Italian “Gliders”. The refreshing mood pictures cloaked in an Yves Klein-like blueness that are the originals have a loose, Wheeler and Taylor like feel to them. I’d suggest listening to KW and JT’s Where Do We Go From Here? (CAMJazz, 2004) alongside Alianti.
A bit plaintive at times, the chamber jazz wrapping that finds no need for banal beats, stupid overdubs, glossy production intrusions or over loud drumming to gatecrash the party on a whim, verges on a free, sort of bluesy connotation in essence but is not in the slightest self indulgently gloomy and you enter into this serious world without really having to adjust your mood whether depressed, happy or neither.
A joy in the conversation that’s an exaltation of an abstraction
Sonically and it is striking even listening on cheap kit to a low quality demonstration stream of this conversation in abstraction that the album is strongly defined. It was recorded by Europe’s top recording engineer for this kind of jazz, a studio bod much used by Manfred Eicher at ECM – the houdini of Udine, Stefano Amerio, where Alianti was recorded at his studio in Italy. Interestingly refer again to Where Do We Go From Here? Why – because Amerio recorded, mixed, and mastered that release. So you can trace a certain provenance sonically as well as artistically if comparing the two as you must, dear reader.
Arthurs hails from Northamptonshire. He has been absent for many years from the London scene to which he contributed a lot in the early 2000s because he has been teaching at a high level as head of the Jazz and Contemporary Music department at HKB, a university for the arts, in the Swiss “capital” Bern. (It’s the same institution where English jazz composer and pianist the legendary Django Bates has also taught).
Alianti highlights include a striking version of the Paloma O’Shea dedicated ‘Preludio de Mirambel No. 5’ a piano piece composed by the renowned Spanish composer Antón García Abril in 1987. It forms part of his “Mirambel Preludes” series inspired by the medieval Spanish town of Mirambel. Check out the Leonel Morales treatment, above.
Simone Locarni I know very little about. He hails from Piedmont and is in his late-twenties. That’s about the height of all I can glean right now apart from the fact that he is on a swinging, rather delightful, trombone led quartet album that the same issuing label Abeat put out a couple of years ago called My Family Things [dig it above]. I’ll certainly want to know more of his work in the future on the basis of the riches in store and the rapport he displays in duo with Arthurs.
Look for Alianti when it is released later in 2026.
