Enrico Pieranunzi signs his twelfth album, as leader or co-leader, for CAM Jazz. After many recordings in duo or trio, the Roman pianist faces a unique undertaking, never done before: composing/improvising the sonatas of the famous classical composer, Domenico Scarlatti. In “Enrico Pieranunzi Plays Domenico Scarlatti” one is witness to the marvellous fusion of two worlds, between the creative and interpretative sensibility of one of the best jazz pianists that Europe has given birth to and the brilliance of one of the most original composers/improvisers of the Baroque harpsichord.
This album is “a very significant leg of the journey, and a long awaited one” says Enrico Pieranunzi in an interview given by Andrea Scaccia and included in the liner notes of the CD, “I have always cultivated classical piano along with jazz; two paths that have characterised my musical life since the beginning, which I have always kept separate in public but that now, thanks to Scarlatti, I’ve been able to bring together into one single discourse.” The decision to devote himself to Scarlatti was practically natural: “Scarlatti is a musician that I have always deeply loved; books of his sonatas have always lain by my piano. I could list so many reasons for this ‘love affair’ — his formal imagination, rhythmic vitality, passion, Mediterranean flavour—his sounds contain the colours of the Italian sky and sea, our desire for life and love and our yearning…”
In his approach to Scarlatti’s music, Pieranunzi has carefully avoided what would immediately seem logical to the listener; that is, to revisit in the jazz key the music of this Neapolitan composer: “I think that all attempts at what they call ‘jazzification’ have been failures both in terms of jazz as well as the classical material they appropriate”. There is, however, something that unites Scarlatti’s music to jazz: “It’s moody, prismatic, full of movement, tracing a kind of life flow, like jazz improvisation, and it is a well-known fact that Scarlatti was an extraordinary improviser. And his language too, although written down on paper, shares with jazz a kind of imposing, pagan physicality. This clearly comes out in his many ingenious thematic motifs, which are rhythmic patterns, melodic nuclei, and at times simple intervals not theoretically worked out but that his hands created directly on the keyboard and then later fleshed out and embellished.”
In the vast CAM Jazz catalog “Enrico Pieranunzi Plays Domenico Scarlatti” is added to the six albums recorded by the pianist with Marc Johnson and Joey Baron (the two volumes dedicated to Ennio Morricone, “Current Conditions”, “Ballads”-winner of the monthly magazine Musica & Dischi’s Critics Award, “Live In Japan” and the recent “As Never Before” with Kenny Wheeler as guest), to “Jazz Roads”-a collection of recordings from 1980, to “Doorways” (in duo with Paul Motian and sax player Chris Potter on some tracks), to “Special Encounter” (in trio with Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian), to “Fellini Jazz” (with Wheeler, Potter, Haden and Motian) and to “Duologues” recorded in duo with Jim Hall.