The cover reads “Framing of compositions” (Tuk music) but the title could also have been “Compositions on shots”. The multimedia project by pianist Emanuele Sartoris and photographer Roberto Cifarelli develops, in fact, the relationship between music and images using the formula of exchange and intersection.
Four pieces “commissioned” by Sartoris to Cifarelli and four photographic ideas by Cifarelli for Sartoris’ piano. A starting point of the collaboration is the song “Riflessioni Sonore”, which translates into music the process of transformation and reversal brought about by the kaleidoscopic photographic composition.
The first song “Nell the shadow of light” also recalls the dynamics of opposites, with the piano improvisation flowing over urban images with strong chromatic contrasts.
The result is an original and innovative work enclosed in a multimedia product: listening to the ten tracks on CD (eight on LP) although it can be conducted in traditional mode, must be completed with viewing of the videos which can be accessed with a specific QR code , thus allowing a complete journey into the compositional world created together by the multifaceted orientations – from classical to jazz – of the Piedmontese pianist and teacher and by the visionary talent of one of the most well-known and present authors of images in the panorama of jazz in Italy.
The spark of the work dates back to a meeting that took place by chance in a Milanese club, thanks to our mutual friend Massimo Bernardini, TV presenter and great music lover, who hosts Sartoris in the program “Nessun dorma”: an invitation to visit the Atelier goes out “Atmysphere” by Cifarelli and here the two artists begin to think about collaboration. The inspiration that led to the form of the different episodes oscillates between the narrative connotation, underlined by Sartoris’ expressive style, and the intent to represent a concept or state of mind in music and images.
Among the first “Archè” dedicated to the work of the sculptor Vitaliano Marchetto, and “Sympatheia”, an excursion between different emotional climates with a breathtaking ending, for which some shots dedicated to Wayne Shorter, an artist loved by both, were selected. The metronomic cadences of “Il tempo”, populated by pianos and clocks, the breath of the wind and the images of the Ligurian coast underlined by the dense textures of a romantic piano of “Zefiro” or the convulsive rhythmic and harmonic turns, the counterpart of the moving shots in “Immobile“, belong to the second category.
The rarefied notes and saturated colors of “Tredici note di colore” and the mirror games of the final “Dietro lo Gaze” are instead ascribed to a less extroverted dimension. “Blue solitudo” is the only song on the CD that is only musical, a nocturne with ample space for interpretative freedom introduced, like some other songs, by Cifarelli’s voice which sometimes makes even the shots of his cameras “speak”, to underline the equal participation of the expressive means used in this successful experiment.
