From Cuba to Harlem

In his swansong album, Italian pianist Marco Fumo takes us 'to the roots of jazz':From Cuba to Harlem. Marco Fumo is considered to be one of the best recent interpreters and champions of African American piano repertoire.

This album begins in Cuba in the mid 19th century, passes through Brazil and to the United States, where these varied cultural roots are further transformed into a flurry of different styles. At the centre of the journey is the piano, with its centuries-old European history of techniques and languages, which in the Americas is enriched with further chapters. The music of the Cubans Saumell and Cervantes incorporates the rhythms and colours of street bands and traits of Afro-Cuban folklore. The album also highlights parallels between the choros of the Brazilian Ernesto Nazareth (which he called tangos brasileiros), and the ragtime of the American Scott Joplin, of whose music Fumo is an expert interpreter having specialised in ragtime since an early stage in his career. Jelly Roll Morton enriched these forms with Cuban-Spanish and blues idioms inNew Orleans Joys, and from the east coast of the United States, we have examples of African American pianists who forged ragtime into a rapid and virtuosic style, with the stride piano of Willie 'The Lion' Smith, James P. Johnson, Hank Duncan that in turn would light the fuse of piano jazz.

"For solo piano on this album to sometimes eclipse the definitive orchestral arrangements of these pieces is a musical miracle from the heart of a masterful interpretive pianist and a loving man. Marco is the only man on earth who could play the secret inner form of these soulful scores."Billy's Music Without Border on Marco Fumo's Odradek releaseIl Mio Morricone: A Tribute to a Friend

"A wise path of reciprocal reflections, combinations that you don't expect between eras, styles, authors. There is Scarlatti's baroque coupled with Brazilian tango, choro, from Nazareth, and then the blues of Aaron Copland. There is the king of ragtime, Scott Joplin, juxtaposed with the immortal tango of Anibal Troilo and the piano stride of James Johnson. Echoes now closer, now more distant, opposites and expressive similarities, stimuli, provocations."Il Centro on Marco Fumo's Odradek releaseReflections

1: La Tedezco
2: Souvenir De Lima
3: Invitacion
4: Tenebroso
5: The Crysanthemum
6: New Orleans Joys
7: Tea for Two
8: Jungle Drums
9: Backwater Blues
10: St. Louis Blues
11: Lullaby
12: Promenade
13: Medley: Fashinatin' Blues/I'd Rather Charleston
14: The Clothed Woman
15: Numb Fumblin'
16: Sapphire
17: Willow Weep for Me
18: Blue Sphere
19: Gaslight
20: Martinique

Number of Discs: 1

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