adEIdJ – Associazione delle Etichette Indipendenti di Jazz

Press Release

Chiara Pelloni’s debut album as leader comes at the end of a fruitful didactic and career path, but it’s also the first important step in conquering an original artistic dimension in a scene, the one of jazz vocalists, which is definitely rich and competitive. After studying at the Bologna Conservatory under the guidance of Diana Torto, with whom she has also collaborated, the young singer from Vignola (Modena) honed her skills with Deborah Carter in the Basque Country, where she spent almost two years. It is precisely during her long Spanish stay that she wrote the songs for «Eve», which she recorded right after returning to her homeland. She explains well in the liner notes: “Eve is a woman who embarks on a journey and each song represents a stage of it. A journey from Italy to Spain, from nostalgia to desire, from isolation to freedom, from chaos to peace, in the incessant and personal search of what really matters. Eve can even be read as a plural in Italian so that ‘Eve’ are all the women in our life (mothers, grandmothers, friends, daughters) and all those ‘women’ that every one of us has within”. Never over the top, Chiara Pelloni has a warm, enveloping, natural voice which reminds more of a songwriter like Joni Mitchell than the great voices of the jazz tradition. She never uses captivating vocalizations, but what marvels is mainly her ability to lead assuredly a septet which includes three wind instruments, with which her voice can converse in the best possible way thanks to refined, charming arrangements. It’s truly a sweet, cozy journey the one that accompanies us from the nostalgic Eve to the ethereal and dreamy Rebirth, from the wordless lyricism of First Peace with the trombone in the foreground – while the trumpet takes the lead in Memories of You – to the only track in Italian, the introspective Quello che conta, which she sings while accompanied on the piano. All the young musicians who play in this album deserve a praise: they don’t upstage her, but actually please her with sensitivity and gentleness so rare to find nowadays.

Track List

1) Eve
2) Please Love Me Too
3) Rebirth
4) Blue Colored Streets
5) Vega
6) First Peace
7) Memories of You
8) Quello che conta

All songs (words and music) by Chiara Pelloni

Personnel

Chiara Pelloni (vocals)
Matteo Pontegavelli (trumpet)
Alvaro Zarzuela (trombone)
Francesco Salmaso (tenor sax)
Lorenzo Mazzocchetti (piano)
Francesco Zaccanti (double bass)
Riccardo Cocetti (drums)

Recording Data

Recorded and mixed at Digitubestudio, Mantova, Italy, by Carlo Cantini on June 19 and 20, 2021