Franco D'andrea - Sketches of the 20th Century

2023

The discovery of the Second Vienna School was a sort of epiphany for D'Andrea and the starting point for the elaboration of a rigorous and at the same time extremely free poetics which finds an exceptional synthesis in Sketches.

The series organization of the individual intervals without tonal constraints and responding only to their own sonority are the basis of the works of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg; the medium through which D'Andrea, as a jazz musician, reads and investigates all the music of the twentieth century, whether it is jazz or classical music, continues to be the interval.

For D'Andrea each interval or each small concatenation of intervals (his Interval Areas) draws a particular colour, in some cases the color of an era, like the augmented sonorities of all the jazz of the 1920s.

But the twentieth century for D'Andrea is above all jazz: from Armstrong to Monk, from Duke Ellington to Archie Shepp. For D'Andrea all jazz is contemporary, it is current.

The scores, arranged by the young composer Eduardo Rojo, are an amplification for orchestral ensemble of the pianist's poetics and language: inside we find his poetics and his musical passions exhaled from the heterophony of 1920s jazz to African polyrhythm , to the cultured music of the short century; inside we find all the intervals and colors of the twentieth century.