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Ferdinando ARGENTI: an italian jazz musician Boston-based
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Hi, Ferdinando. I'd like to start asking you something about your biography. You have had a long experience as a musician playing on cruise ships, hotels, clubs. What's left in yourself of that kind of experience today?
As many musicians-from Italy or not-that started playing in the 70s, I also got involved in the rock music of that period, although at home I'd be listening and appreciating my father's records too:
Benny Goodman,
Glenn Miller,
Louis Armstrong,
Ella Fitzgerald
etc. Very soon I started making a living and also getting some musical and life experience out of my town's
(Pisa) environment by playing music first in ballrooms and discos in Tuscany, then in Italian and Swiss nightclubs
and finally in hotels and clubs of middle and northern Europe.
The music I had to play was very often not satisfying to my musical taste and my need of expression, which brought me to listen to jazz and fusion during a big chunk of the rest of the day and then reproduce those phrasings I still had in my head during the solos that I was allowed to take on the gig at night.
Let's say that this type of experience is good for a rather short period, to build experience in a
"working" situation, but it's best not to stay in it too long or you'll
end up getting stuck in a type of mentality and attitude towards the music which is counterproductive, so risking to be distracted from the pursuit of the ideals of creativity and art, which are the ones that count and bring you to
self-realization as a person and as a musician.
Luckily I got out of it in time - though I could have done it earlier - starting instead
a transformation process that - I believe - brought me to find those ideals.
Cruise ships on the other hand - especially the ones in USA and now Japan too - are an excellent
"practical" school: you have to play everything, but in different musical situations and often in
"small big band", a 6 or 7 piece group with 3 or 4 horns where you play a lot of swing
"Basie style"” and a lot of traditional jazz and the requirement of musical competency by the musicians are much higher then in a European night club or hotel.
What is left in me of it today? Pretty good "practical experience", nice memories of trips to many different countries with musicians
and entertainers from all over the world, and the two songs of my CD: "Raccontami di te" and
"La più bella del mondo", which were played a lot in the 70s in all Italian night clubs!
When did you decide to go to the United States?
When I understood that personally I would have been motivated and facilitated from a school like Berklee that would have
"regimented" me and pushed to study harder the music that I was already loving and playing but with not enough technical insight and with limited experience. So on a nice day in
'83 I decided to terminate my trio with which I had worked all year in Norway, Switzerland and Germany, and in January
'84 I gathered my savings and took the first plane from Stuttgart - parting company with my girlfriend - for the already famous
Berklee College of Music in Boston
of which I had known by two Italian musicians friends of mine who had already been there and of which I had noticed the obvious leap forward
in technical quality and concept. Their names were
Antonio Petrini
and
Adriano Viterbo.
What did Berklee give you?
A lot on the first year: a big leap forward in sight reading, great progress in the knowledge of the various piano techniques of jazz harmonization and that reflected also on my bop-based phrasing style
- but I must say that was there already. But of course through a better knowledge of reharmonizations and techniques and a constant experience with an ever-increasing number of jazz tunes you can only become opened to new insights and ways of expression even in that sense.
The next 2 years before the graduation certainly were helpful, but the impact of the first year
- and above all the first semester - were stronger.
By that, I surely do not mean that the Berklee or American experience are imperative: there are so many great Italian and European musicians
that are "self-made"! The main thing is listening to a lot of jazz and practising,
then if you have a little inborn talent, you can reach your desired goal. Music is a little like life: you never stop learning anyway!
You played with Chet Baker, Lee Konitz, Kenny Wheeler. A memory of each of them.
In '87, meeting me for the first time at dinner, an hour before playing on the first gig,
Chet
asks me in Italian "Do you know
My Funny Valentine?". I answered "yes" a little intimidated by the knowledge of his highly superior jazz experience, but he simply says:
"Then it's OK", after which he falls asleep between pasta and the second course, wakes up when dinner is almost at the end, then we play in a quintet and of course he plays as usual: as a God!
Lee Konitz, on a break between sets on a duo gig, gives me a couple of words of appreciation and then goes
"Hey, I already have given you two validations and you have told me nothing yet". I really was still in some kind of trance
from the poetry the he could create by himself with me on Fender Rhodes, and my accompaniment must have sounded very standard to him-being used to players
like Andrew Hill, Martial Solal, Enrico Pieranunzi - so I replied "But you don't need that: you are LEE KONITZ!" . He
laughed and said : "Sure I need it!". Sometimes we idealize these greats' image so much that we forget they are human beings, too. You should have seen him when I brought him to visit the Baptistery near the Tower of Pisa: he started uttering these loud whistles because they had told him there was such an incredible eco there, and a priest immediately hushed him up with a
"shhh!".
Kenny Wheeler, trying a composition of his:
"I don't particularly love the hi-hat on two and four". The hi-hat owner, who really was a Buddy Rich and Max Roach influenced drummer, adapted himself pretty good
- it was mainly an evening of standards anyway. Kenny's tune "Smatter" is one of my favorites.
Tell us about your piano influences both technically and expressively.
I never had a single pianist "idol", as it may happen naturally to others.
In improvisation I always instinctively tried to reproduce the phrases of the horn players, and this always made me think that perhaps I shouldn't have stopped studying clarinet when I started travelling. I have more natural facility with melody than with harmony
- a lot of pianists have the opposite.
But we have to remember
Horace Silver
and another great - recently passed away in tragic circumstances -
Jaki Byard, who both played sax. Horace started with sax, then changed to piano and some say that gave him his personal touch on piano.
Like Jaki Byard I may have also have a particular attribute (or a bad habit? not everybody appreciates it): I occasionally play a solo or a tune inserting excerpts of styles coming from different eras of jazz. But it's not a constant habit.
I'll mention influences from different periods of jazz, some more audible in my solos, others less:
Teddy Wilson,
Count Basie,
Oscar Peterson,
Bill Evans,
Wynton Kelly,
McCoy Tyner,
Herbie Hancock,
Chick Corea. I'd like to add
Ray Charles, that very few people know as a be-bop pianist, and a British pianist, then better known for his rock jazz organ work:
Brian Auger. Among the horn players,
Charlie Parker,
Chet Baker,
Gerry Mulligan.
What kind of approach do you follow in improvisation?
Involuntarily I already answered this in the previous question, but I can add something from the stylistic point of view: I'm more comfortable and I feel more at ease in a hard bop situation, although I did some study on the more modern styles and I can play Miles Davis tunes of the Shorter-Hancock period or a Coltrane tune of the
McCoy Tyner-Elvin Jones period without resulting too out of place stylistically. I guess it's my personal choice to stay
melodic - if I ever "go out", as we say, is very briefly. When I play melodically or even lyrically,when the tune allows it, I try not to lose in energy and
"groove". Also you can hear some blues too, that is also part of my vocabulary in soloing, although I rarely compose blues tunes.
How is your practise organized today both with piano and voice?
These days I'm really not practising. I'm known for not practising much! But when I do:
certainly I still feel much more of a pianist and a writer of tunes than a singer, but my goal is to bring all levels at a better technical and expressive balance.
Technically, on piano I'm trying to furtherly improve my timing, and refine the
melodic and harmonic interaction with the soloist during comping.
On improvising, I'm gradually relaxing and trying to play less patterns, favouring a melodic and
"saving" approach, shifting the position of the phrases on harmonic progressions in a more unusual manner, to reach an effect which is
still melodic because of the choice of notes, but more modern and - I hope - more personal. On vocals, I practise a little traditional technique, but I mainly work on
improving the phrasing and delivery effectiveness and my English pronunciation: even though I think I have a good
pronunciation, here life it's tough if you are not a native speaker (in this case a native singer)!
Still on the voice: influences by Chet Baker and Frank Sinatra. Listening to your CD one may also feel a strong bond with the tradition. How important is it for you?
To me it's definitely important, because I like when the melody is stated in a way that people may recognise the tune, then I also like to scat, but as if it was an instrumental chorus, coming back to a melody that may be interpreted and varied, but staying within certain limits. Saying this, I don't mean in any way to undermine the work of the great contemporary jazz vocalists like Betty Carter, for example, it's just my very personal sensibility. If this would make the critics consider me or my eclectic CD not too
"jazz" according to their set of ideas about it, I'm not going to worry: music, as everything else, is increasingly becoming more
"global" and labeling genres or styles never did work completely for everyone.
There is still the debate, for example, whether Frank Sinatra was a jazz or a pop singer: I think he should be considered both, because he started in the
Harry James
big band and then he was with
Tommy Dorsey's big band, before going on his own, in an era when big bands and swing were both jazz and pop. But after all, who cares? He was great and that's it! Chet Baker, on vocals, is considered a jazz singer because of the settings in which he would sing, and then he also did great scat, but if you hear the way he sings the melody, his variations aren't that many more then Sinatra's, of which vocally he was actually an admirer. They both stated the melody in a very clear and seemingly relatively simple way, but still interpreting it, like Billie Holiday, who was an influence to both, and giving it each his own personal touch.
Often, wrong or right, even critics are...criticized. How do you live the relationship with critics and how do you think it should be? Besides, what is the American situation?
Well, I'm only a beginner in my relationship with the critics, but, observing the musical world, I can tell you this: there are critics that know what they are talking about, and others that are ..."improvising" more. In jazz you have the purists, and the non-purists. What does
"purist" mean anyway? Jazz itself at the start was a form of fusion!
Surely the critics and jazz writers are capable to find an incredible number of adjectives to define and describe the music and the style of a musician or a singer. Once I was reading a book by a friend of mine,
Luciano Federighi, who writes for
"Musica jazz". I remember reading perhaps 10 adjectives in a row at one point-just to describe the quality of a singer's voice. That's an amazing ability!
Critics are useful for the artists as advertisement for their work; beware of the negative reviews, though...as musicians we should go on doing what is dictated to us by our soul without becoming influenced by critiques of any kind. I admit that it's not easy...
Let's go back to tradition. Since some time even in the States through operations like the one of Wynton Marsalis tradition is being revaluated.
Before talking about tradition, first we have to say that jazz avant-garde anyway never really had it so easy in the United States!
I think that those pro-tradition operations surely brought a lot of young people back to jazz, which in the
'70s was in serious danger of "estinction", and this is the positive side, together with the large jazz teaching activity in schools and colleges that Wynton (and Branford) Marsalis and the so called
"young lions" have promoted. The negative side is that in analyzing music from other eras at the microscope and reproducing it almost
"as on the record", often one forgets to bring out the soul of that
music - if it's even possible today - and those "reproductions" often sound perfect technically but in my opinion they are cold,
dry, they miss the spirit that was filling the original performances. May be it's just because the original performances were simply reflecting the spirit of those special times?
It's funny you ask me this now because I just started a conversation by e-mail with a 55 years old trumpet player from New Orleans,
Richard Robson Fleming, who spent the last 15 years of his life in planning a personal system to bring back to life
jazz music of the 20s and 30s following his program called
Original Culture Network, and preparing a
"non-political system" to create an international business and artistic structures designed to support world problems called
"World Unity Project". Just a charming visionary with an utopian dream? An interesting person, definitely, you can contact him at
richflem@bellsouth.net or go on
www.worldunityproject.com.
On the CD there are 7 originals of yours, 3 standards (very good "You don't know what love is") and 4 Italian tunes sung and rearranged:
"Raccontami di te" by Bruno Martino ,"In cerca di te",
"Bambina innamorata" e "La piu' bella del mondo". How did the CD tracks' selection come about?
Undoubtely this is an eclectic CD, but I hoped that the arranging style, and the melodic approach in the composition and the solos would create a link between them. My originals were composed in different periods of my life, but recorded together on a CD for the first time. On a CD which is my first as a leader I didn't want to include only originals, and I thought I would dare singing in Italian in the United States simply because it is my first language, and if latin-americans here can do it with Spanish, I don't see why we shouldn't.
In North America the image of the Italian language it's still linked to opera and
unfortunately there is a mental association with the advertisement of restaurants
and pasta recipes!...Don't misunderstand me though, I love good "serious" Italian traditional singing and I'm very proud of
Andrea Bocelli
and of the incredible success he's having here in the US.
He's perhaps the greatest singer in the world today regarding of genres (moreover, he is from the Pisa province!...).
I met Bruno Martino personally, while I was accompanying with a singer in the same club in the Versilia area of Tuscany one afternoon; he came personally to give us his compliments, and I told him right away that I always had been one of his fans. He was one of the few that was writing, singing and playing jazz oriented songs in Italy in the 50s and 60s.
"In cerca di te" is one of the preferred songs of my father, who loved
Natalino Otto's work as a singer. Natalino was an Italian crooner of the 40s that should be revaluated and heard again on his recordings, in Italy and elsewhere.
"Bambina innamorata" is another beautiful Italian
"standards" that I would like jazz players to play more, at least as much as it is done with
"Estate",
Bruno Martino's song that
Joao Gilberto,
Chet Baker
and
Shirley Horn
introduced on the world jazz scene.
I think this CD is a little bit of a sum of my various experiences and musical likings.
Beside yourself, you had as many as 16 musicians playing on the album. Would you like to introduce them to us?
The musicians on the CD are all inhabitants of the New England area (Ma , R.I., ME , N.H.) except
Jorge Rossy
,drummer from Barcellona, Spain who now lives in New York and records with the great Brad
Mehldau, after having played with Paquito D'Rivera). Jorge recorded with me
"You Don't Know What Love Is" in Boston, when he was still there some time ago. All other tunes in my CD are more recent.
On that tune on bass we had a marvelous player,
Raetus Flisch, a Swiss who's now back home and I don't know where. Anybody who knows it and can tell me how to contact him?
The most present musicians on the CD are
Todd Baker, a fine bass player with a rock solid time-ex Berklee College of music student and now professor at the University of Massachusetts who has played with Scott Hamilton, Buddy De Franco,
Cab Calloway, Steve Allen, Hellen O'Connell, Rosemary Clooney, Woody Herman & Artie Shaw big bands, the
Four Freshmen, etc., and
Bob Savine, a fine and sensitive drummer with a nice sound who has worked with Herb Pomeroy, Pat Metheny and his brother Mike Metheny (trumpet), Fred Hersch, Tiger Okoshi,
etc.
They both are part of my trio and of my seven or eight piece band with piano, bass drums, 3 horns, accordion, and percussion.
The accordion player, the only other Italian, is
Roberto Cassan
from Fanna (Pordenone , Italy), also an ex Berklee student.
Between the originally non-Americans, there's a Frenchman,
Lionel Girardeau,
and one from Argentina,
Fernando Huergo, both electric bass players and both former Berklee students, Fernando is now teaching there.
Resuming with the Americans, here is
Phil Person, great trumpet soloist (I am especially pleased of his beautiful solo on
"Bambina innamorata") and
Tim McCall, who is the tenor sax player with the big Dexter type sound on "Sea Sadness", a ballad of mine. I met him in the Artie Shaw big band directed by Dick Johnson.
Al Cron
played almost all trombone solos
- definitely a hard bop player!
Renato Thoms
- a percussion player from South America - was included on some latin oriented tunes.
A flute player can be heard on a couple of tunes,
Bob Patton
(also on alto sax), who actually was also the engineer of almost all recordings on CD except
"You don't know what love is". Then there are
Mike Peipman, from Australia, who played trumpet and flugelhorn on two tunes, and
Jeff Galindo, a Berklee faculty member who also has played with Phil Woods, and also has a CD out.
Finally, the other 2 drummers you can hear in the CD are
Steve Langone, who also has a CD on his own, and
Steve Hass, a New Yorker also ex student of Berklee.
Besides the already mentioned "You don't know what love is",with Jorge Rossy and Raetus Flisch,
on the CD tunes in which you play with in a trio with Todd Baker and Bob Savine you seem totally at ease and you all interact very well. To that extent I'd like to mention the 2 tunes of opening and closing of the CD, Cole Porter‘s
"Easy to love" and George Gershwin's "Our love is here to stay", beside
"Pisanova" and "Ferdi's mood" (with the addition of some
"pads"), your compositions.
What do you think of the possibilities of expression offered by the trio compared to larger groups and
what is the leader's approach?
I'll tell you straight that at the beginning I was undecided if I should record just with a trio or not.
Surely the trio gives the pianist more chances to express himself freely. But in this disc I wanted to satisfy my arranging inklings, and I definitely do also like orchestrated music with a larger number of instruments. With the trio I let the bass player and drummer free to play following their feeling, obviously telling them how I hear the tune with
"my mind's ear". With a bigger group obviously I have to be more rigid and specific in my demands and instructions to the other musicians.
Who are in your opinion the Trios of yesterdays, but mainly of today, with the capital T?
Well, I may mention two great trios even if very different:
Oscar Peterson's yesterday (although he is still alive and playing) and
Keith Jarrett's today
especially the last recordings who are even closer to my jazz sensibility (in other words, I enjoy more listening to him there).
Would you like two more, still different from the previous two?
Benny Goodman
trio - the day before yesterday...: in 1938 circa! (Goodman on clarinet, with Gene Krupa on drums and Teddy Wilson on piano, trio that then became a quartet with the addition of Lionel Hampton on vibes)
and that relatively recent of
Chick Corea
with John Patitucci and Dave Weckl, or
- before that - Chick with Eddie Gomez and Steve Gadd (I don't think these three did a whole album in a trio, though, did they?). The trio with Patitucci and Weckl sometimes is virtuosistic for the sake of it , but they are so
"clean" and precise and it's a pleasure to listen to them live, as I did.
And did you hear
Brad Mehldau's? A new genius of jazz counterpoint with a great trio. Some other ones?
McCoy Tyner's with Elvin Jones in the 60s, no matter which bass
playe,
Herbie Hancock
with Ron Carter e Tony Williams,
although even of them right now I can't remember a whole album in a trio. Any
Bud Powell
trio! A very recent trio with a latin-funk feel and a highly energetic groove?
Michel Camilo's:
great piano playing!
Which Italian pianists do you know and appreciate?
I already mentioned the great
Luca Flores, who unfortunately is not
with us anymore. A serious loss for Italian jazz, as much as the loss of
Massimo Urbani, who once on a gig asked me if I had studied Luca's playing (I really hadn't) and told me how highly he thought of him as a jazz pianist.
Two other great ones, although different:
Enrico Pieranunzi
e
Dado Moroni.
But now there are so many very accomplished ones, that I wouldn't like to leave out anybody, but I'll mention obviously the known
Franco D'Andrea, and then
Paolo Birro,
Antonio Farao',
Salvatore Bonafede,
Renato Chicco,
Rita Marcotulli,
Danilo Rea,
Stefano Bollani,
Mauro Grossi
etc .
The CD contains many background photographs of Pisa and Florence. How important are for you these cities?
You are right. But there is also one of Venice, one in Rome, one of a Norwegian
"fjord" and one of the Grand Canyon!
Surely Tuscany and especially Pisa, my hometown, are important to me, but so is the rest of Italy. I think that many people that live abroad develop - by one side - a healthy ability of detachment from their homeland, but at the same time
a love and a pride for it which is bigger than when they were actually living there,
when the every day habit would make them take everything for granted.
When I come back to Italy with my Italian-American wife now I appreciate things like architecture, historical sites, landscapes much more... (not to talk about clothing and food!...)
The CD is produced by FERDI'S MUSIC which is your label. How does this idea start and since when does it exist? Do you plan to produce other musicians?
The label is indeed mine and it has been in existence for a year. It is also my publishing company who is affiliated with ASCAP. For the moment I'm not thinking to produce other musicians, although it is certainly possible in the future.
An opinion on the present jazz scene in the U.S
I have always heard how in USA jazz doesn't get enough consideration as an art form, as instead it does in Europe or Japan, where in comparison is taken in high
consideration. Let's analyze this issue. Partly it is true, even though things here have changed for the better in the last 20 years. Lee Konitz himself in
'87 told me he had to come to Europe because in New York he didn't have enough work and we know that many famous jazz players went to live in Europe.
The problem in America is not so much the consideration as a form of art - that's better
now - but the funds that are put aside for the arts in general, which I believe to be comparatively larger in Europe. They tell me that here in US democrats generally tend to be more generous to the arts than republicans are.
But from the "cultural" point of view there is also the other side of the coin.
I lived both in USA and all of Europe and I noticed a substantial difference in the musicality or the use to certain types of music in the average person.
The average man or woman in North America seem to stand or appreciate much more a jazz solo than the European (be that solo Michael Brecker's or Coleman
Hawkins's). I'm talking about the average person, not a jazz aficionado.
Here music is so much a part of everything and of everybody that people perhaps are just more accustomed to more musical genres, especially improvisation ( if we exclude may be the most extreme avant-garde!).
"My funny Valentine" here is a jazz tune, but is mainly a song of which people know the lyrics and which they connect it to Valentine's day. in Europe, it's a jazz tune that an elite of people with a more sophisticaded ear knows because of Miles Davis and Chet Baker. Here you can play traditional jazz until
be-bop (included) and people will dance to it when they can. In Europe that does not happen.
Do you know what I mean? Jazz here was once the music of the people and that stayed in their everyday culture and their consciousness.
In Europe it has never been, at least until now.
On the other hand, Europe was able to recognize the right value of jazz as a form of art that was born from the people (afroamericans originally and mainly, but not only)
and this fact has had its positive repercussions in the United States.
Everything in the western world is equalizing anyway, thanks to the media, internet, more cultural exchanges and more frequent transoceanic flights.
Even the "groove" and the rhythmic precision are not anymore total supremacy of the Afroamericans or Northamericans in general. Last time I've been in Pisa, Italy I heard a jazz-funk duo with a kind of drive and
"groove" I normally would only expect in New York!
In Europe there is may be more creative research now in jazz, even though often-in my opinion-too much intellectualization.
To me it's not only with your brain that you compose a tune, but with that deep and higher part of you that is able to move you when you find that melody and harmonic progression that touch your heart.
Jazz isn't dead anywhere, only sometimes attention to technical perfection in performance is overcoming feeling and soul of the music.
But there are still those who put their heart in it.
Playing jazz in the States - or in Europe - and making a living with it - is still hard.
I'm lucky right now to have 6 gigs a week where I can play standards and even some originals. Meantime I'm promoting this CD and the 2 groups (trio and 8 piece band).
One more thing on this: I don't know if "Smooth jazz" ever got to Europe, but
here there is this commercial genre with that name - selling well - of which Kenny G is the supreme champion, disliked by the more devoted jazz players but bought by the people, and in that context you can hear a lot of very different artists - for example they mixed
Dave Koz
and
David Benoit
(funky easy listening pop jazz =
smooth) with
George Benson,
Nat King Cole's old recordings and his daughter
Natalie Cole
and sometimes just straight pop tunes - only more sophisticated!
Let's say that something gets here too. I followed the harsh controversy between Kenny G and Pat Metheny a little! I have a nice CD from David Benoit (Waiting for spring) with the great and lamented Emily Remler, John Patitucci and Peter Erskine, but for the rest I didn't enjoy much of what I heard very much. What do you think of it of that
"wave"?
I haven't heard the CD you mentioned, I'll try to find it.
Well, in general "Smooth jazz" is monotonous; it's played neatly and precisely, but with little substance to it, and it's always very well recorded soundwise but there is little spirit, so it's very impersonal, unless it's George Benson, of course (in spite of the fact that they play him a lot on Smooth jazz radio programs, I'd never call him
"Smooth"!)
I have nothing against more easy-listening music, if compositions have character
and musicians put their soul in it (as George does, no matter what he plays), that is, if the themes are beautiful and the solos are intense.
Yes, the controversy between Pat and Kenny amused me, here there have been several funny articles about it on newspapers and magazines too, and both of them had supporters and opponents. Everybody agreed though that Kenny isn't the most accomplished sax player in the world but certainly the richest and the most followed by the masses.
Do you follow Italian jazz, the festivals, the musicians? If you do, who or what in particular?
I follow through the web, the Italians that pass by here, and my visits in Italy -
increasingly rare lately, but I still know many musicians that I contact every now and then to have some news. I saw
Paolo Fresu's website (I played with him a few times between
'87 to '90 ). Nice site. I didn't know he was a lover of poetry (outside music).
An advice to people that - from Italy - dream of Berklee and America.
To be a student at Berklee nowadays is increasingly expensive, but the College offers many scholarships and also is in Italy every year for the workshops in
Perugia, in the same period as
Umbria Jazz
festival. Berklee is more and more a school that is world famous for jazz but the paradox (but also a necessity for its business)
is that at the same time it's also more and more opening its doors to rock and pop music, and introduces more classes of technology applied to music and business of music (which by itself isn't bad at all).
Berklee lately also increased its buildings and rooms space; it has teachers of all levels and musical experiences. The good news (relatively recent) between the teachers are
Joanne Brackeen
and
Kenwood Dennard. At the moment two Italian musicians I know are still teaching there:
Marcello Pellitteri, drums, and
Lello Molinari, bass.
If the "dreamers" of Berklee and America happen to love adventure and have some savings, why not, may be they can do it, reinforcing or alternating the Berklee experience with great musicians and private teachers of the area like
Charlie Banacos
or
Jerry Bergonzi...otherwise, as I said, there are a lot of good musicians and teachers in Italy, too, now!
Concluding, Ferdinando Argenti oggi.
An ex "nomad" - wanderer of the musical world that finally established himself in a steady place and finally is discovering himself in many ways and especially in that of the music, trying to propose to the world what he has inside and never really
let out. Sometimes, though, I get a little nostalgia of my wanderings: so I hope to be travelling again in the future, but this time with my music!
Ferdinando Argenti tomorrow.
My goal is to promote this music until all or part of the music of the CD obtains more listening and support of the promotional type, to be able then to go on recording on the same
"route" and refine my compositional abilities - I also write lyrics, but I didn't include any in this album - and be able to express myself with a kind of music that comes from the best part of me and that I wish may be able to spiritually enrich who's listening ... and who's playing it!
Will we see you in Italy?
I hope that very much. I'll be in Italy anyway for a visit to my increasingly older but still upbeat parents next February 2002 (I still don't believe these numbers!).
Thanks a million and so long, everybody!
We hope too, perhaps with your trio ...
Sure, with a trio it's easier to get gigs!...
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