There are albums or pieces of music that must arrive at the right time to touch your heart. That's why, even though I've known about this music for a couple of months, I decided to write about it only today. "Why" is a short but compelling title. It challenges listeners to think beyond conventional boundaries, immersing them in the flux of past and present while transcending societal norms. In essence, it embodies what every piece of improvised music should aspire to achieve.
Joel Futterman, like William Parker, is a veteran of free jazz. Born in Chicago in 1946, Futterman was influenced by Clarence Eugene Shaw, a trumpeter and student of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way. Musically, Futterman was a devoted student of Coltrane, Dolphy, and Monk. One striking aspect of his style is that, while sounding contemporary, his melodic approach—even when pointillistic and abstract—sets him apart from Cecil Taylor and other contemporary piano masters.
It has often been said that Taylor played the piano as if it were a drum set. Futterman, however, plays the piano as if all these techniques, borrowed from Monk, Cage, and others, were honed to fit his own unique vision. After playing in Chicago from 1964 to 1969, the pianist moved to Virginia Beach in 1972. His first album as a leader was released in 1979, and his many collaborators have included Jimmy Lyons and Richard Davis.
Following a period of musical inactivity, Futterman returned to collaborate with various artists, including Kidd Jordan and Alvin Fielder. It's not surprising to see him playing in this set with William Parker, who, after a period of playing with musicians of his own generation in the supergroup The Commitment, began collaborating with veterans like Cecil Taylor and Peter Brötzmann. Listening to the "Why" album, it's clear that Futterman and Parker fit together remarkably well.
I've mentioned pointillism, and indeed, Futterman's style of attacking with short phrases and notes, their effect prolonged through subsequent phrases, matches perfectly with Parker's bass playing, both plucked and bowed. There are moments when their interplay is almost telepathic (as it should always be in this music), and you can sense that the two are playing after dismissing all rational thoughts and practices, relying instead on intuition and more emotional skills.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with Gurdjieff and his 'Fourth Way.' One of his most important statements is that we tend to love as we count, using our rational mind. However, he proposes a new way—the fourth—in which we can learn to be different, more complete human beings. In this sense, love, like art, is both a territory in which to enjoy this new self and a doorway to it.
Even the most skeptical listeners can appreciate this music and be captivated by the beauty and density of this dialogue. While Parker, playing with Taylor and English drummer Tony Oxley in the so-called "Feel Trio," was accustomed to playing independently from the other musicians, here the 'interdependence' between the two musicians is clearly enjoyable.
I've recently listened to many free improvisation albums that have both highlights and lowlights, but this album consists entirely of 'highs.' Therefore, I wholeheartedly advise listeners to experience and enjoy it in its entirety. "Why" is not just an album; it's a journey into the depths of musical intuition and emotional resonance.
It is strange and difficult to present an Italian artist to an English-speaking audience. If the last records of Fabrizio De André can be appealing for those of you who are into ethnic music, as an example, a genre he practiced way before the label has been instituted, his first albums are mostly, even if not exclusively, collections of ballads for voice and acoustic guitar. For those of you that don’t understand his language, such a listening can be challenging.
Anyway, long story short: Sony Music is re-releasing this year the entire catalogue of De André, from his very first songs collected in Vol. 1 (Sony, 2024) until his last masterpiece Anime Salve (still to be re-released). For those who know nothing about Faber – as he was called after his friend and actor Paolo Villaggio – Fabrizio De André is a singer whose work can be compared to that of U.S. songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, without the risk of looking ridiculous.
De André himself translated in Italian Desolation Row and Romance in Durango – he was greeted with cheers by Dylan himself for translating the latter – to testify a deep link with the U.S. songwriting tradition. Moreover, he was inspired for his album Storia di un Impiegato (Sony, 2024) by the beat poet Gregory Corso, while for Tutti Morimmo a Stento (Sony, 2024), maybe the first concept album released in my country originally in 1970, his source of inspiration was the album Days of Future Passed (1967) by The Moody Blues.
Tutti Morimmo a Stento, De André first proper album after a collection of singles, deals with topics like death and sorrow: drug addiction – De André himself was an alcoholic, so the song is partially autobiographical - paedophilia, war, are only some of the subjects touched by the songwriter. The album, co-credited to Gianfranco and Gian Piero Reverberi, Riccardo Mannerini and Giuseppe Bentivoglio, is the starting point for future collaborations of De André with other artists.
If, in fact, Dylan wrote by himself all his material, Tom Waits started collaborating with his wife Cathleen Brennan after 1981 and similarly Fabrizio De André always co-created his music with other people. Someone used this habit of him to suggest De André wasn’t a proper creator, needing always other artists to rely on. But in fact, sharing creativity can be a great way not to let yourself stagnate, even because De André always greeted his co-authors openly.
Another album you might want to listen to, in these new editions, is for certainly, between the LPs still reissued, Non al Denaro, Non all’Amore Né al Cielo (Sony, 2024), inspired by Edgard Lee Master’s Anthology of Spoon River, a book translated in Italy by Fernanda Pivano, who was also a Jack Kerouac’s friend, gifted to De André by his first wife Enrica Rignon. The singer was so hit by the collections of poems that he wanted to create an album of songs from the book.
In this album the pivotal figure, between dwarfs who study as to become judges in order to finally get respect, chemists who refuse to die for love and die for strange experiments, musicians who will play for all their entire lives and blasphemers who refuse to get down on their knees for an invented God, is the guy with a sick heart who dies giving his love his first kiss, a symbol of courage and of the importance of love even above the preservation of life.
Co-written with Nicola Piovani, the album is one of the most theatrical in De André’s collection. In between there are the pure collections of songs like Vol. 1, Vol. 3, Canzoni, where the singer, as the above-mentioned Tom Waits, sings of people who lives by the wrong side of the road: prostitutes, little thieves, and all this universe of people De André was going to hang out with during his formative years in Genoa, his hometown, even if he was middle class.
Perfectly remastered – even if the previous 2002 editions were sounding great also, thanks to a 24 bit processing – and packaged in a slightly greater than the usual format if you buy CDs, while the LP have the usual dimensions, the albums are accompanied with a small booklet full of notes from De André diaries and interviews. If you love the U.S. musicians I mentioned in this article before, it would be a shame that these songs don’t touch your sensibility.
Fabrizio de André was an anarchist also, a true one, an intellectual who all of his life tried to be independent – he gave life to a farm in Sardinia in order to write only the songs he really wanted to, instead of commercial successes – but even if far from stardom he was appreciated by most famous musicians like the pop singer Mina, who covered his song La Canzone di Marinella, dedicated to a dead prostitute.
Possibly an anomaly in our cultural panorama, even if perfectly inserted in a small number of ‘songwriters’, Fabrizio De André later will experiment with ethnic instruments and structures, but maybe we will dedicate another article to him at the end of the year, when the planned re-releases will be fully available. For the moment I have given you advice of at least a couple of albums of him to fully enjoy.
I have a deep respect for Johnny Cash. Not only he was one of the greatest songwriters of the American songbook, not only he has been also a collaborator of musicians such as Bob Dylan. He was also an interesting human being, even though controversial for many. For a long period a fervent Christian – “I’d rather know you hooked by heroin than hooked by Curch” told him some of his collaborators and close friends during those years – he, as an example, recorded a live album in the Folsom Prison, bringing some sparkles of truth with his music to the hosts of the prison.
Honest and true to himself, Johnny Cash was able to put everything he encountered – faith, the good and the evil, the ghosts of depression, the joy of love – into his music at a level that is quite impossible for another less empathic and self-centered, in the best sense of the word, artist. After an out of focus period during the 1980s, thanks to Rick Rubin who had the great idea to let him play with basically only his voice and an acoustic guitar for many albums, Cash had another period of splendour during all the 1990s until his death.
In his American Recordings series Johnny Cash released such beautiful and intense songs as Will Oldham’s I See a Darkness, Trent Reznor’s Hurt, Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, obtaining great results from the works of the greatest artists of those years, sometimes pairing, sometimes going far beyond the originals in terms of intensity and interpretation. For all those reasons, I was quite curious of hearing the thirty minutes of music conveyed into this new, posthumous, The Songwriter.
To tell the truth, almost everything is in its right place: the voice, the guitar, the hosts, like June Carter Cash or Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys, the many instruments that give shape to the music accompanying the vision of their author. But not everything is all right. To tell the truth, this collection of songs lacks coherence and a proper project. Everyone can hear that songs like Soldier Boy, Drive On – the more emotional, Poor Valley Girl are disposed the one after the other without a vision or a sense of togetherness.
Recorded just a few time before the collaboration with Rick Rubin started giving life to albums where you can feel a narrative sense even if the single songs are different the one from the other, the songs on The Songwriter, that can also be found as charming per se, don’t give life to a proper album to tell you the truth. A nice companion for a proper Lp, as a second disc of outtakes, sold as a ‘new’ proper album of unedited material it doesn’t make a great sense at all.
A similar operation to Montage of Heck, a project dedicated to some demos Kurt Cobain recorded at home and then published for mere exploitation, even if these Cash songs are well produced, refined, and feature many musicians – the list is impressing – cooperating to give life to a vibrant new album, the result is in my opinion similarly scarce. Obviously you’ll find some greatness sparks, but this is not the point …
