Hands Jazz Trio - Our Favorite Standards & Other (2020)

There are standards and standards: those increasingly abused (and also, in some cases, mistreated) and others that, for a thousand reasons (perhaps because they are more difficult to perform?) Are also neglected in the classrooms. Antonio Tosques, Marco Contardi and Leo Marcantonio, prefer the more impervious way by putting on a songbook full of indigenous pearls and borrowed by some jazz greats, such as "Voyage" signed by Kenny Barron, fast and swinging, full of figures enhanced by perfect intonation by Tosques, with clear and precise melodic lines. There is Monk's "Hackensack", which enhances Tosques' wise saturation and reverberation and the tension effect created by Marcantonio's battery. You travel through Horace Silver's hard bop and soul jazz in "Silver's Serenade", which puts the perfect amalgamation of the trio in proscenium. Then, Tosques' chapeau at the great Jim Hall with "For Jim", made of stop and go by the enviable groove woven by Marco Contardi, which supports the fresh words chiseled by Tosques.

The trio also remembers Nat King Cole (for some time now relegated to a corner) with the classic "When Sunny Gets Blue", a ballad where the duet between Contardi's organ and Tosques' guitar is underlined from the brushes of Marcantonio. Also "Along Came Betty" by Benny Golson reminds us how the past is a foreign land and the trio performs it with graceful grace.

A bossa could not be missing, but not the usual "advertising", but "O grande amor", which exudes Stan Getz and João Gilberto despite the absence of the saxophone: intense work at Contardi's Hammond, which embeds the notes making the sweet flavor of the Latin rhythm bitter.

An impeccable record, both from an executive point of view, of the choices and interpretations that have a high degree of personality and underline - if necessary - the professionalism of the three Apulian musicians.