Dino Rubino, Marco Bardoscia and Stefano Bagnoli usually perform together in Paolo Fresu’s live and studio projects and for his label, Tǔk Music. Their chemistry is well established, and the piano trio may be the best formula to let the three artists express their full potential. An album of the trio, “Solitude”, was released a few months ago.
Rubino’s triple album of new songs seems to meet the need to set a key moment in his career with such a challenging and ambitious product. It’s Dino Rubino’s seventh album on Tǔk Musi, the first in trio after 11 years, and it has a specific structure: the first two records include original compositions written by the pianists in the latest years, while the third one mainly contains standards. The album takes its title from one of these standards: Solitude by Duke Ellington.
The three of them know each other well, which is an excellent start for a piano – double bass – drums trio. The melodic research is the unifying theme – not the only one – of the trio’s music, both in composing and performing. The melody is the major contribution of the Italian way of jazz: it’s the signature of an immense heritage ranging from opera to marching band music, from songwriting to folk tradition. The trio performs with the natural ease of those who feel at home on a journey that prefers soft settings, while, in the standards’ record, the trio merges with the mainstream of American jazz music.
