10.01.2024 | Artist

Gianluigi Trovesi at 80

Our good friend Gianluigi Trovesi celebrates his 80th birthday today.

A true original, Trovesi arrived at ECM in 1994, his alto saxophone and clarinets soaring into the Skies of Europe proposed by the Italian Instabile Orchestra, perhaps the most outstanding idiosyncratic soloist in a band chock-full of them. He provided the label’s runaway surprise hit of 2001 when he teamed up with his old friend, accordionist Gianni Coscia, on In cerca di ciboa left-field recording brimful of mordant humour, improvisational wit, unrepentant nostalgia, and exceptional musicianship that roved easily between jazz and chamber music, folk and soundtrack music, with a hint of klezmer.

A pillar! An ancient yet young soul.
Stefano Bollani

The duo returned in 1995 with an album of Kurt Weill and Weill-inspired improvisations, and a few years later applied a similar approach to German-born composer of French operettas, Jacques Offenbach, on Frères Jacques. Their explorations are free-wheeling and wide-ranging, likely to break into swing or rhythm and blues at a moment’s notice. London Jazz News called their collaboration “irresistibly enjoyable”.

Trovesi’s other projects on ECM include Vaghissimo Ritratto, on which he appears with Umberto Petrin (piano) and Fulvio Maras (percussion, electronics), hailed by the Irish Times as “improvised chamber music of stunning quality and adventure, melodic grace and rhythmic freedom” and Fugace, a rampant genre-hopping adventure by an all-Italian octet.

His 2008 album Trovesi All’Opera – Profumo di Violetta is a typically quirky Trovesi take on Italian opera performed, as Ivan Hewitt wrote in the Daily Telegraph, by “a turbo-charged version of a traditional Italian town band”.

Courageously innovative as well as rooted in his land
where the local and the global come together.
Paolo Fresu

2019’s duo album, La misteriosa musica della Regina Loana is a brilliant tribute to the late Umberto Eco, a lifelong friend of accordionist Gianni Coscia. The two Italians cast a wide net, playing songs associated with Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller and George Formby, paraphrasing Janáček, dipping into movie music, and improvising most creatively while keeping their dedicatee in view.  Repertoire revisits “Interludio”, a piece that Umberto Eco and Gianni Coscia collaborated on 75 years ago.

Stravaganze consonanti, released in Spring 2023, is an inspired collaboration with noted baroque violinist and conductor and Stefano Montanari. Gianluigi Trovesi extends the line of musical enquiry posited on his Profumo di Violetta album. Supported by a cast of players well-versed in the ancient sounds of period instruments and the art of historical performance practice, Trovesi looks anew at music of the renaissance and the baroque – at Purcell, Dufay, Trabaci, Desprez and more – adding compositions of his own and stirring some improvising with percussion and electronics man Fulvio Maras into the intoxicating brew.

Many happy returns, Maestro!