Mirco Mariottini - Ritual Songs (2020)

Originality and innovation, in jazz, do not always require the writing of new compositions or the invention of extreme and unheard of expressive forms; what matters, in jazz, is first of all how you use your voice and how you make it communicate with that of your companions. When you can do these two things well, the originality of the material and the technical innovation become secondary, because the artistic specificity and the unheard of come out alone in the shared plot.

The pianist Alessandro Galati and the clarinetist Mirco Mariottini have always known each other, but only today, in the height of artistic maturity - each of the two, in recent years, has created works that were small pearls -, have they decided to refine their understanding and develop a repertoire to perform in duo, a classical formation with strong lyrical and introspective potential.

Thus was born Ritual Songs, album released at dawn in 2020, which collects a selection of jazz standards reinterpreted with passion, study, accuracy, and above all interpreted by making their respective sensitivities interact, so as to dig deep into the songs both from the point of strictly musical, both emotionally.

The result is an enveloping and suggestive music, with misty but relaxed tones, characterized by dilated spaces within which the two pour sensations and stimuli. A music with a vaguely melancholic lyricism, which fascinates, pushes to meditate and on several occasions it strikes for how it focuses often very famous songs - for example "Lover Man" or "Invitation" - but in which Galati and Mariottini, almost talking with their instruments , however, manage to find new aspects to reveal.

A duo with splendid sounds, to listen with relaxed attention, letting yourself be absorbed by the atmospheres and observing their precious details, because it is in them that the personalities of the musicians, their artistic figure, the beauty itself are hidden. Neri Pollastri.