adEIdJ – Associazione delle Etichette Indipendenti di Jazz

Press Release

Dario Cecchini is mainly known to jazz enthusiasts for being the leader of Funk Off since 1998. It’s a marching band as popular as it is innovative, it has released eight albums and been a regular guest at Umbria Jazz since 2003. Cecchini leads Triozone as well, a trio completed by Fabio Morgera and Guido Zorn, as well as the Jazzasonic Quartet, with Claudio Filippini, Gabriele Evangelista and Stefano Tamborrino. His solo concert is the brainchild of Pino Minafra for the 2017 Talos Festival in Ruvo di Puglia and since then, when the opportunity presents itself, the Tuscan saxophonist has played baritone sax, the most agile of the saxophone family, despite it not being his instrument. Upon taking a look at the international scene, it’s easy to draw up a list for soprano, alto and tenor sax solo performances, some of them considered historic, while doing the same for baritone sax is much harder. The names of two musicians, the English John Surman and the Swedish Mats Gustafsson come to mind straight away. When Dario Cecchini had us listen to the recording of a solo concert he played in his native place Pieve di Vicchio (Florence), where he still lives, we were fascinated and deciding to release it on album felt natural. The chosen tracks, the length of the improvisations, the tone and dynamics, everything seemed to merge perfectly well with the place where the concert took place. By using the church’s resonance in the best possible way, the musician has been the star of an intense, gripping 35–minute performance divided into three parts, the last of which dedicated to encores. In «Echoes» Cecchini played eleven songs, almost entirely original compositions if we exclude three standards among which a short, quivering Goodbye Pork Pie Hat for what would’ve been Mingus’ 100^th birthday. More than parts of a suite, the three moments sound like long improvisations, where the written and improvised sections alternate with stunning smoothness. In the end his tricky bet has been totally won.

Track List

01) Intervals
02) Full & Empty
03) Peace
04) Multi
05) Driftin’ down the Arno
06) Change Is Coming
07) You’ve Changed (Carl Fisher)
08) Norwegian Family
09) Emil’s Song
10) Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (Charles Mingus)
11) Wishing on a Star (Billie Rae Calvin)

All music, unless otherwise noted, composed by Dario Cecchini

Personnel

Dario Cecchini (baritone sax)

Recording Data

Live recorded at Pieve di San Giovanni Battista, Vicchio (Firenze), on 26th March 2022; recorded and mixed by Nicola Cellai, Andrea De Donato and Roberto Prezioso; analogic mastered at Digitalsound Studio, Vedelago (Treviso), by Walter Bertolo.