MY WAY IN JAZZ

I had been dreaming for years to set up my own West Coast style jazz group which would play a repertoire made up of the best original pieces composed by the greatest Californian players. In short, I wanted to continue what I had started with my first record The Revival of West Coat Jazz, which I had made with Lanfranco Malaguti and Piero Leveratto in 2001 for Splasc(h) Records.

I thought straightaway of the name for the group: The Lighthouse Giants, in homage – as it should be – to Howard Rumsey and Shorty Rogers, leaders of the two most famous Californian groups. And the subtitle read meaningfully: The Men of West Coast Jazz, a clear allusion to the third great West Coast group: the Men of the drummer Shelly Manne.
A harder task was that of finding the scores of pieces which had been unfortunately forgotten, except for two by Gerry Mulligan. The selection has been judicious and a laboured one. One cannot imagine all extraordinarily beautiful pieces composed by Californian jazz players. In this delicate operation I was assisted by my father, who is a fervent lover of this style and has all the West Coast style jazz records published between 1951 and 1962; these are records which I listen to all the time and which I know by heart (though I do not overlook, of course, all the other jazz schools: from New Orleans to hard bop). There are hundreds and hundreds of them.

But the greatest difficulty was that of transcribing the parts. I was lucky to have Antonello Vannucchi come to the rescue; he – with passion, competence and generosity – has done a fantastic job.

In the meantime I also had to find players who were compatible with my project. A difficult task, since nowadays all follow models which are wrong and misleading. Up North there are some excellent who master this style: I have in mind especially Luca Begonia and Claudio Chiara, with whom I hope to work in the near future.

Since I already play with a trio whose components live one in the Treviso region (Lanfranco Malaguti) and the other in Genoa (Piero Leveratto) – and I live between Rome and Florence – and I know only too well the logistic difficulty of such a situation, I was looking for players who lived nearby. Californian music requires, infact, many rehearsals and extreme precision: I hate the amateurial jazz of the jam sessions and the endless and boring pieces of modal jazz, to which I am allergic.

I finally selected Stefano Rossi, a very accomplished tenor sax player à la Getz, who stands at the extreme opposite to the muffled sounds of the dull and impersonal players à la Coltrane which have infested the jazz scene in the last thirty years; the baritone player Enrico Ghelardi who has modelled himself on Gerry Mulligan, Serhe Chaloff, Bob Gordon and Lars Gullin and whose record Lost Love (“Domani Musica” DMCD 0205) is a perfect example of how one could play today a highly creative and authentic type of jazz by expressing oneself in a absolutely pure style; Mauro Battisti, a classy, elegant and well prepared double-bass player who has on various occasions collaborated with Lee Konitz and Benny Golson.

Only Antonello Vannucchi could have been the piano player since he has been in Italy at the fore front of West Coast jazz with his Lucca Quartet/Quintet, together with the wonderful Basso-Valdambrini Quintet (later Sextet, with Piana) – the best jazz group ever seen in Italy – and the Quintet Fanni-Volonté, along with such players as Glauco Masetti, Attilio Donadio, Franco Cerri, Flavio Ambrosetti, Gil Cuppini and Maurizio Lama and the composer Piero Umiliani.

I intend dedicating to them – and to Nunzio Rotondo whose sextet recorded the most successful examples of Italian cool jazz à la Tristano – a record with their compositions since I believe that one should pay homage to the men who in the Fifties have characterized modern jazz in Italy with class and measure: qualities which have hardly been seen in subsequent periods.

I am fully convinced that West Coast and cool jazz should be urgently rediscovered since they have been wrongly undervalued by a bias and demagogic critique (remember the times when idiocy reigned and Getz, Mulligan and other great artists – guilty of not making guttural noises or not howling with their instruments – were being accudes of fascism?), and I am fully convinced that it is high time to set aside the foolish contaminations – which unfortunately are à la page in these days – with rock and ethnic music. I have already written in the Selfportrait which accompanies Gian Carlo Roncaglia’s cover notes for my first record that jazz must be based on swing and must be essentially of American derivation.

The best European jazz players (from Lars Gullin to Stan Hasselgard, from Tubby Hayes to George Shearing, from Kai Winding to Ronnie Ball, from Ken Moule to Pierre Michelot, from Arne Dommerus to Don Rendell, from René Thomas to Bobby Jaspar …) and from any other parts of the world (I am thinking of the Canadian Phil Nimmons, Moe Koffman, Nick Ayoub, Guido Basso, Rob McConnell, or of the members of the Australian Jazz Quartet/Quintet, or still of the Argentinian Oscar Alemann) are European only by birth, but American in style. The only player who has been absolutely original in terms of jazz is Django Reinhardt, especially when he was pairing with Grappelly; but his music is so rich in swing that the American model is quite obvious.

These days, unfortunately, it has become fashionable to free oneslf from the swing and to offer – maybe because of the ruling anti-American attitude – some crafty contaminations with folklore from the Balkans, Mittle Europe, Sardinia or perharps from the Lucania and Padania regions. These efforts, I am surprised to say, are taken seriously. If, however, we are talking jazz, it is another matter. I am all for a total revival of the genuine American jazz: from King Oliver to Eric Dolphy, from Bix to Art Pepper.

Gianmarco Lanza

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