Cheap Empty Room (Music) (Sal Nistico Quartet) Price

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Customer Reviews of Empty Room

Certainly worlds apart from what she went on to record on The Woman Next Door and Koine, with their ultra-sophisticated world-jazz vibe, this is pretty straight forward hard bop, although played at a very high level. If one moves toward more adventuresome music, it can never hurt, one suposes, to have something like this in one's resume, in case the jazz police come calling for one's bona fides.

Throughout Marcotulli demonstrates monster chops. Her first solo (and, interestingly, she's the first one to solo on the disc), coming on the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer standard, "Come Rain or Come Shine," displays an architecture, melodicism, and rhythmic invention of the highest order, even somewhat eclipsing the leader's excellent effort which follows. Her approach bears a distinct resemblence to early Keith Jarrett, even so far as engaging in the same slightly annoying, barely on-mic vocalizing as she solos. And she comps brilliantly as well, constantly feeding Nistico sophisticated chords smartly voiced.

Nistico himself was a fluid, masterful player, thoroughly familiar with both swing and bop vocabulary. It's often said that you can tell the quality of a jazz artist by how he or she plays a ballad. Nistico passes the test with flying colors, getting Strayhorn's "Lush Life" exactly right, with deep conviction, in a gorgeous fasion but without sentimentality, and tinged with melancholly.

The centerpiece, Joe Henderson's greatest tune, "Inner Urge," taken at breakneck speed, showcases both the band's deep and deft conversational abilities and their prowess as soloists, Nastico's hortatory and expressive, Marcotulli's impossibly fleet, deeply swinging, rhythmically charged. Near the end Nistico and drummer Roberto Gatto engage in a stunning passage of back-and-forth conversation.

"Empty Room," a mid-tempo ballad and Nistico original that seems to shift between 3/4 and 4/4, conjures a kind of wistful melloncholly that the band instantly picks up on and hands off to Nistico and Marcotulli for solo expressions of the mood.

Sammy Cahn's sly standard, "I Should Care," seems almost a jaunty, brave-smile-in-the-face-of-advercity commentary on the previous number: OK, you've gone and left me with an empty room, I should care--its sprightly, uptempo mood sustained for a full five minutes until a distinct sadness sets in as the tempo and mood slip back and forth between lento/somber and upbeat/cheerful, the latter prevailing.

Things close out with Charlie Parker's rousing "Hymn," a stirring bop statement of perseverance in the face of adversity, with appropriately expressionistic solos from the two leaders.

A note about the rhythm section, Roberto Gatto on drums and Marco Fratini on bass. These are two very fine players from the relatively unknown--at least in North America--Italian jazz scene. They don't get a lot of solo space, but when they do, the demonstrate prodigious chops--Gatto especially. And they always imbue the proceedings with a rock-solid foundation.

A marvelous--near classic--expression of a venerable strain of this mercurial, original North American music, jazz, seen through a Southern European lens.