Emilia Vancini | Guillermo Martín-Viana - Pigri
(Summet Records, 2025)
Innovative and fearless, Italian vocalist and composer (by way of The Netherlands) Emilia Vancini last released a recording in 2020—And If You Fall, You Fall (Espira). This proved to be one of the most important jazz recordings released that year. Vancini and pianist Augusto Pirodda fashioned a spectacularly postmodern reimagining of jazz standards comparable to similar readings of the same material by the late Martial Solas on Live At The Village Vanguard: I Can't Give You Anything But Love (CAM Jazz, 2009) and Star Eyes 1983 (Hatology, 2009), the latter recorded this alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. These performances, all, reflect jazz…music…at the razor’s edge of creation, where inspiration becomes tangible, and the abstract becomes reality.
Where Vancini and Pirodda engaged the tempo and harmonic structures of the standards addressed on And If You Fall, You Fall, Vancini and drummer Guillermo Martin-Viana, on Pigri, strip the song vehicles to the studs, rebuilding them minimalistically. The album’s title refers to the only Italian song included in the collection. “Pigro” is a 1970s protest song written by Ivan Granziani. The song portrays inflexibility as a source of perniciousness and shortsightedness. “Pigro” is the Italian singular for “lazy.” Bounced into the plural, Pigri exists as an inside joke to Vancini and Martin-Viana, Vancini stating, “…we were too lazy to find other musicians to play with us and because we were too lazy to compose new songs…” It should be great that other excellent projects emerge from an equivalent “laziness.”
The starkness of the format is clear on the opening song Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Alfie.” The song is a justifiable kiss-off to a philandering boyfriend from the movie of the same title (Paramount Pictures, 1966). Vancini and Martin-Viana’s treatment is stark bright light, illuminating the callowness of its subject. There is a panoramic post-apocalypse vibe to this reading. Vancini’s vocals are plaintive and bitterly fatigued response to the subject’s hedonism. Martin-Viana provides anxious accents to Vancini’s admonition of the vague character, Alfie.
Sting’s “Bring On The Night” from the Police’s Reggatta de Blanc (A&M, 1979), is an inspired foil to the arid “Alfie,” addressing a more contemporary song. Vancini loses none of her acerbic post-apocalyptic angst as she dares Dylan Thomas1 to “Bring On The Night.” Sting and Vancini do further poetic damage with,
“The evening spreads its sail against the sky2 / Waiting for tomorrow…”
Martin-Viana’s fractured drum rolls ebb and flow with Vancini’s nascent rage continued from “Alfie.”
The two musicians interestingly use a curious slice from the American Songbook. Buried within the production program is the tryptic of “Stars Fell On Alabama,” “He Beeped When He Should Have Bopped,” and “But Beautiful.”
In the former song, Martin-Viana establishes the closest approximation to a time signature of 4/4 found on the recording. Rather than filling the considerable space in the song, Vancini inserts a vocal Roman candle smoldering in the center of the space. Dizzy Gillespie’s “He Beeped When He Should Have Bopped” provides Vancini an a capella area where she gracefully scats her way through the introduction and interior of this cheerful song. She nearly does the same thing with the standard “But Beautiful.” This song is most meaningful to the singer as it contains the verse that titled her previous recording,
“Beautiful to take a chance / And if you fall, you fall
And I'm thinking / I wouldn't mind at all.”
Something suggests an understated nature of Martin-Viana’s playing. His percussion almost seems suggested. This is the stunning centerpiece of the recording. While Pigri may be a challenge, it stands up well to multiple listening, revealing something new, even essential, each time.
The song is Sting’s answer to Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night” (Botteghe Oscure, 1951)
Allusion to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Prufrock and Other Observations, Poetry, June 1915).