Music recorded in Barga Jazz Club on the latest Hector Zazou disc

“The Arch – Eva Quartet & Hector Zazou”  the last album by Hector Zazou was released by Elen Music in 2011. An album which to my surprise and pride, included me as a guest musician, along with many world-class musicians including Laurie Anderson, Robert Fripp and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Hector came to see me in Barga in October 2007 and said he wanted to record some trumpet for his new work featuring Bulgarian music.

At that time I was working on the music for the video of  IVECO together with Stefano Onorati and Roberto Cecchetto so we set up a working area inside the Barga Jazz Club, and between working on one video and another, Hector made some recordings of both Robert Cecchetto and I.

We spent a few days together listening to music and in particular the draft of my album “Invisible Cities”. Hector had liked the concept of the disc and also the material heard so far and had offered to help the arrangement and the subsequent finalization of the work but the year after on ‘September 8, 2008 Hector died, leaving a great void in the music world but especially in the hearts of those who were his friend.

Andrea Guzzoletti’s tour of “Invisible Cities” borrows its title and its thematic structure from the brilliant prose-poem of the late Italo Calvino, Italy’s most imaginative 20th century writer. Le Citta Invisibli, published in 1972, was ostensibly an account of Marco Polo’s “conversations” with Kublai Khan – descriptions of the Mongol Empire’s far-flung capitals by a wandering merchant who knew the Great Khan’s immense realm better than the emperor himself. The two men shared no common language, and in Calvino’s rendition their exchanges revolve around largely non-verbal reactions to emblematic objects that Polo has acquired on the long road from Venice to China. It is left to the reader to interpret the responses that each object invokes in the emperor and his Venetian guide. – complete article on Invisible Cities can be found here

I thought that everything recorded was lost, until in November of 2011 while I was in Arizona, I received an email from Mr. Dimiter Panev asking me all the details regarding the registration and in which studio it was recorded etc.

 It was very nice to be able to say that my recording and that of Roberto had not been made in a recording studio costing millions of Euro, but quite simply in Barga Jazz Club – a place staffed and maintained with enormous difficulty by volunteers, but which at the same time was a place that oozes music from the walls even though it is situated in a small place like Barga lost in the hills of Garfagnana and well away from the major centres of the music business world.