**** Temporary SUSPENSION of SHIPPING to USA
CHICK COREA & STEFANO BOLLANI DUET
"UMBRIA JAZZ 2009" DVD R
Recorded live in Perugia, Italy, "Arena Santa Giuliana" -main stage, July 13, 2009
Concert review:
Watching the two great pianists, Chick Corea and Stefano Bollani, at the Arena Santa Giuliana proves that jazz is best experienced live: What you see in a performance can inform the music as much as what you hear.
Certainly their sounds are different. Bollani's is chordal, percussive, and prone to virtuosic flights of fancy; Corea's is sparer, more lyrical, and has bluesier inflections. What can't be heard on a recording, however, is how Bollani throws himself, literally, into his playing ;he rocks, sways, stomps his feet, and dances to his own music. Corea, by contrast, is very staid and
stiff: a conservatory stance that belies his extraordinary imagination.
After a piece of silly, Victor Borge-inspired stage business,
Corea and Bollani began with a long, dissonant improv with shades
of Debussy, trading devilish phrasings and re-phrasings in a very
dark, very slow development. When Corea hit a double trill,
however, the discernible melody of "On Green Dolphin Street" began
to take shape. Once the tune had hit its stride, the musicians'
stylistic differences revealed themselves; for example, Corea
showed a tendency toward the lower half of the keyboard, Bollani to
the upper. Bollani also let his percussive instincts loose,
slapping the chords out of the keys while Corea's lyrical fingering
dominated his work.
Despite the distinctions, the pianists' musical empathy was
apparent. They worked from a setlist, but no sheet
music—their eyes divided time between the keyboard, and each
other. The arena's video monitors focused closely on Corea and
Bollani's faces, allowing a glimpse of two master musicians
studying each other intently as they traded off the roles of melody
and rhythmic accompaniment on "Picture in Black and White" and "Hot
House."
If the songs were warhorses, though, at Corea and Bollani's
hands they became implacably modern. Nowhere was this more apparent
than in a mini-set of Thelonious Monk compositions. "'Round Midnight" emerged from another long, improvised intro, then dissolved into a wash of passing chords and subversions. Occasionally another Monk fragment would surface, but they never lingered long and were frequently dissonant,
embellished, and barely recognizable. After a wonderful
improvisation that had them trading fours, the duo veered without
pause into "Blue Monk," but only as a launchpad for another
swirling, abstract improvisation that morphed into disjointed parts
(the opening four-note riff, the half-step turnaround) of
"Epistrophy" before returning to "Blue Monk." Throughout, Bollani
would stop playing the keyboard to begin plucking and tapping the
innards of his instrument with a drumstick.
The crowd was thrilled. After an angular, superbly virtuosic
encore of "Take the A Train," they swarmed down the central aisle
to the stage, screaming for a second encore. The musicians obliged
with something sure to please the frenzied spectators: Corea's most
popular tune, "Spain." Corea urged the audience to sing along to
some of the song's familiar hooks, a tactic that found fan after
happy fan whistling those same hooks on the walk back from the
arena. That, surely, is how you know you've seen a great
concert.
Chick Corea, piano
Stefano Bollani, piano
Running time: 69 min.
PRO-SHOT / TV SAT
Region free code
Never commercially released DVD
High quality print art cover
