Alessio Cazzetta – Love, Death and The Eternal Blues

The tone makes the music, it is so aptly said, and most of the time this is true. In special cases, however, it is the sound that has quite a decisive influence on the tone. Love, Death & The Eternal Blues, the new album by Berlin/Basel-based guitarist Alessio Cazzetta, captivates with its sound from the very first moment. Like a tornado, the opener "58" approaches the ear from the acoustic horizon, becoming more and more vehement until it rises to absolute intensity and seems to sweep everything away. This equally enigmatic and profound force continues over the following seven tracks with unbridled furioso, even in balladesque moments. The sound on Cazzetta's album evokes memories of great power records of the 1970s, but also of newer formations like Tigran Hamasyan's trio, Aaron Parks' Little Big or the bands of pianist Cameron Graves. The crucial prerequisite for this high energy level is, of course, the band. Cazzetta has a knack for assembling a team from different contexts that intuitively masters a variety of game-changing situations. He is not only concerned with virtuoso skill and conceptual spontaneity, but even more with the emotional devotion of all involved.

In his quintet, individual voices and playing styles, as well as different national and cultural backgrounds, come to the fore. This intercultural tension results in an almost unlimited global access to the songs, which makes the instrumental origin of individual impulses in the overall sound sometimes completely forgotten. For all the different timbres of the individual songs, they are united by their immense harmonic depth. The arrangements are infused with a kind of dark transparency that offers deep insights but rarely complete vistas. The quintet's complexity releases a mystique in which it is no longer the individual moment that matters at all, but the totality of voices, which in turn triggers completely different associations in many moments. It is as if one would climb into a cave, whose walls of stone one suspects, but in whose imagined vastness all imaginable chimeras seem to lurk. Alessio Cazzetta's Love, Death & The Eternal Blues defies almost any comparison. The guitarist and his band have succeeded in creating a unitary galaxy, a music of the spheres whose central star may be jazz, but whose planets and satellites circle in the orbits of heavy metal, classical music, blues and prog rock. A universal album for universal spirits!