Classical and Jazz: Review - Italian clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi and accordionist Gianni Coscia at King's Place
Published: 25 March 2010
by GEORGE FOSTER
SOME of today’s most interesting jazz is from countries bordering the Mediterranean where the jazz avant-garde explore local musical traditions.
At first, clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi and accordionist Gianni Coscia seemed a pair of elderly Italian gents who had accidentally wandered into their Kings Place concert last week from a nearby wedding.
They cracked “odd-couple” jokes through an often-bewildered interpreter.
But when they played their own compositions, traditional Italian melodies or Basin Street Blues, this two-man powerhouse had tremendous verve and swing, more than living up to their huge reputation in the jazz world.
Trovesi played both the little piccolo clarinet and the larger sax-shaped alto clarinet, ranging from the delicate and wistful to screeches and honks showing his origins in the 1970s jazz avant-garde.
Accordionist Coscia provided rhythmic pulse, rich harmonics and lightning melodic runs from an instrument not normally associated with jazz.
The music could seem simple at first until you noted their rhythmic and harmonic complexity and the confident virtuosity.
We had tango, 16th-century folk dance, Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny and 1950s dance-band but most memorable was their exuberant foot-tapping sense of swing.