6:35 AM – 2015

FELICE CLEMENTE TRIO 

Crocevia di Suoni Records CDS010
January, 2015

Felice Clemente | tenor and soprano sax
Paolino Dalla Porta | double bass
Massimo Manzi | drums
special guest Daniele Di Gregorio | vibes and marimba

Liner notes by Felice Clemente

Biological or artistic, every birth is an Event.

Each event has a precise beginning, a moment, even an hour where everything turns on, takes shape and becomes irreversibly real. Sometimes this epiphany turns your life around. Nothing will ever be the same as before and the future seems to offer new exciting chances. Something unheard of runs over your being and you have no choice but letting yourself go with its vital flow. This happens in music as it happens in life.

My daughter’s birth, to whom I dedicate my latest work, has been an Event for me. Her birth made my soul waving thanks to extraordinary feelings and internal changes that have restored my self totally. Since that moment, 6:35 a.m., July 22nd, nothing has been taken for granted anymore, “improvisation” has become undeniable, exactly as it happens in jazz music. I have badly wanted to transfer this event into music.

Therefore, my 10th CD represents my will to try and keep going further, without accepting what has been already done or experimented. I wanted to “risk”, taking nothing for granted, both in compositions, structure and roles. I wanted to keep my mission and my desire to touch the sensitive part of my listeners intact, through the catchy melody, supported by the variety of rhythm and timbre.

With the addition of marimba and vibraphone tracks, our trio allows to play several textures which are more flexible and free. All this has been possible thanks to the choice of extremely sensitive, capable, and kind musicians, who have truly believed in this vision of music and life and with whom we were able to create a great feeling.
The final product is an authentic, honest, and dynamic kind of music, that goes from wild improvisation to extremely soft moments. It’s a music of emotion and wonder, similar to the feelings that you experience when someone or something comes to life, and even in its fragility, it changes everything. Every birth, biological or artistic, is an Event.

Felice Clemente

Liner notes by Davide Ielmini

The “Mediterranean yeast” of a Jazz crooner.

There is the jazz that comes before John Coltrane, and the one that comes afterwards: in order to decide which road a musician should take, a musician needs to know them both .Felice Clemente has decided to take Trane and Joe Henderson as mentors: tenterhooks and velvet of the same breath.

Born in Milan in 1974, Clemente lets his music ferment in the “Mediterranean yeast”: intellect and heart, summary and clarity, melody and impulsiveness. This CD has become a drop of life in the human sea. Ingredients for “popular jazz” are all present: recognizable themes, dancing rhythms, colorful timbers, rich expressivity. Paolino Dalla Porta plays rounded sounds, Massimo Manzi squeezes swing even from a can, and Daniele Di Gregorio combines exoticism and nationalism. A logical syntax, as in an artisan workshop, which releases from exasperation and climbs over the communicative paralysis of the 20th century.

Clemente is the son of his time: on one hand, he refuses the indetermination of the 21st century, on the other he honors native roots of a global jazz, which similarly to romantic music is the supreme artistic language. He is a superlative performer, composer and arranger (his teachers have been Tino Tracanna and Corrado Guarini). He lives jazz as a reaction of vital rhythm, in which every beats “must create tension,” as Giorgio Gaslini said.

This way “Enjoy” was born, with its “zig zag” melody, and “To Sara”, with its soothing tune. “Mal d’Africa” has come to life from the meeting between East and West (with veiled “tribalism” transformed into a song). “Canguri urbani” is particular for the elasticity of the rhythm – almost like cats playing with a ball of wool. In the end, what really matters is that this group represents an artistic coherence that nowadays helps those who think that jazz is too complicated to understand (due to their lack of ability for “listening” to music). Letting yourself go with Clemente’s sax is an amazing therapy, because you get the chance to know an “informal singer” who follows an aesthetic of resonance and fluidity, without betraying himself and his art.

Davide Ielmini