Miniatures

Bassist and composer Marcello Sebastiani has never gotten the tango out of his system. From his earliest recordings in the 1990s, he has pursued Piazzolla's meld of blood, sweat, intoxication, and poetic whorehouse imagery into a doggedly personal meditation on the nature of love, loss, grief, and their culmination in beauty. Sebastiani hasn't always done this through the performance of tango music, however, far from it. Indeed, it would be easy to count his strict tangos on the fingers of one hand. Instead Sebastiani pursues a muse that informs jazz, blues, classical, new age, and even popular music with that milonga spirit. On this set, Sebastiani pares his orchestral sized band into a quintet with help from a vocalist on three tracks and a keyboard player on two. Here jazz, elegiac pastorals, classical impressionism, and Latin entwine each other in a dance of desire. "Saxite" is a scat tune with a wonderfully taut intervallic moment by Geoff Warren's soprano saxophone with Lorenza Fontana's voice. "Miniature #1" is a Latino jazz study with alternating harmonic figures quoted by the soprano and Daniele Di Bonaventura's bandoneon. As Alfredo Laviano readies a drum solo, the bandoneon offers an entry to Warren, who soars into mid-tempo guamba and touches on a tango motif before taking it out. Even on "We Bop Blues," which is characterized by the slippery bass work of Sebastiani himself, riding out a I-V-IV figure and sliding the last note in the rhythm up an octave before Warren enters with a scalar blues right out of the Blakely hard bop book, elements of the tango slither into the middle eight when the blues slapping is at its height. In a shimmering glissando Sebastiani coaxes a milonga mode out into the heart of the blues. Sebatiani is, alas, on Amerikanski shores, all but unknown. But nowhere is he regarded as the guiding light of compositional architecture or as the inspiring instrumentalist he is. It's a shame, too, as records like the Alice Project are such rare things on any continent.