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SOLO IN ROME
Nicola Puglielli, Guitar Solo, Terre Sommerse 2021
Nicola Puglielli's new album “Guitar Solo” (Terre Sommerse, 2021) is the first album presented by the Roman jazz musician - a new experience for the guitarist and composer, who is able to magically recreate an orchestra on the guitar with his left and right hand. But above all, it’s a journey on strings through different musical worlds. Puglielli is not afraid of venturing away from jazz and trying out new paths.
This CD includes his own compositions (such as Non scordar la memoria, dedicated to the sax player and friend Massimo Urbani, and In the middle, from the album of the same title), ballads (The Ballad of the Fallen, dedicated to a student killed in Salvador and also the title of a record by the Liberation Music Orchestra, by Charlie Haden and Carla Bley), instrumental rhythms from Africa (such as Berimbau, which accompanies the Brasilian Capoeira - a mixture of the fight against against slave owners, acrobatics and music), notes and music created from a name (Mi-c-h-a-e-la), and the jazz version of an aria of one of Giuseppe Verdi’s operas (Stride la vampa). This piece is from the album “I Trovatori” (also produced by Terre Sommerse), a refined experiment by Puglielli that involved elaborating Verdi’s opera in a jazz version, for jazz quintet.
In “Guitar Solo”, Puglielli presents fourteen tracks that are all very different from each other, the perfect mix for a pleasant hour of listening. In the album – as well as in the musical life of the artist – the expected and the unexpected, the defined and the improvised, acoustic and electric sound, classical technique and jazz all co-exist. The whole album reveals careful planning, but also a sensitive technique that leaves room for surprises. The pieces are characterised by the guitarist’s use of improvisation, who is curious to explore new musical emotions with a light touch.
The cover photos were taken in the verdant Valle della Caffarella, which is part of the large Parco dell’Appia Antica in the south of Rome. Puglielli is very attached to this place, he often goes there for walks and to play his guitar, far from the traffic and city noises. There is no better place for a guitar solo.
Nicola Puglielli was born in Rome in 1962. As a guitarist and composer, he is constantly in search of new frontiers for guitar and jazz music. One of the most important results of this quest is the album “Play Verdi” from 2015 (also in the version “Play Verdi Live”, Terre Sommerse) - a sensitive approach by four jazz musicians to Verdi’s opera, with an admiring acknowledgement of “Play Bach”, the groundbreaking jazz meets classical album by Jean Jacques Loussier.
Puglielli presented his first solo track in 1999 on the album “In the Middle”, for the rest recorded with his Trio and initially produced by the German label Jardis. At that time, the German magazine Akustik Gitarre defined him as “a new star of jazz guitar”, and remarked on his ability to re-evaluate the guitar in jazz, playing with different techniques and moving lightly between sounds and genres. Nicola Puglielli has played with Massimo Urbani, Giovanni Tommaso, Kirk Lightsey, Steve Grossman, Tony Scott, Philip Catherine and Walter Abt. He has worked with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Louis Bacalov, Nicola Piovani, and was the artistic director of the jazz festival “Jazz in Forte”, in Rome.
He has been teaching the guitar to both young and old for many years. “It will be the very young who give new life to the guitar because it is still one of the instruments they love most”, he says.
https://nicolapuglielli.net/