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Bruskers
Guitar Sketch 2009
(Italy)
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On Guitar Sketch virtuoso Italian guitarists Matteo Minozzi and Eugenio Polacchini give a personal expression to a set of ten well-known jazz standards. The album features also a beautiful piece composed by E. Polacchini. It is a surprisingly fresh and energetic guitar dialogue, sometimes punctuated with humour, blending classical and "sketchy" jazz. The beauty of the album as a whole relies undeniably on the clever interplay between the two musicians. Their musical personalities intersect, complete and compliment each other, spontaneously filling the right space, telepathically finding the right tone at the speed of sound. There is no cliché here, their swing is rather impressionistic and warm with an inventive twist to each song that often takes the listener by surprise.
Track listing:A Night in Tunisia;Blue Bossa;Black Orpheus;Little Piece in C for You;I Remember Clifford; All of Me; Not Tomorrow; Caravan; Besame Mucho;Take Five; Nature Boy
Musicians: Matteo Minozzi-guitar and Eugenio Polacchini-guitar
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Since 2003 the Bruskers are Matteo Minozzi and Eugenio Polacchini. The main feature of this guitar ensemble is the synthesis of the two different musical worlds and ways of understanding the guitar which reflect the musical education of the two musicians. Polacchini, who graduated in Classical guitar at the Conservatorio “Tonelli” in Carpi, epitomizes the typical “classical music player”, always capable of reaching the perfect execution, Minozzi instead studied under the direction of different guitar players and shows the artistic flair and the unconventionality of contemporary and jazz music. The two musicians share and combine their personalities in this experience and the result is an extremely various and eccentric mixture of ideas, sounds, and rhythms, whose contrasts are set apart by the common savoir-faire in favour of a inspired and original end product.
At the beginning busking was the main interest of the duo. They have performed at several street festivals in Italy as well as abroad. In the last few years they have been looking for more intimate atmospheres: they have privileged art exhibitions, theatre shows, private events. They’ve also had fun in joining some local radio station events. Minozzi and Polacchini are both teachers of the Music School of the “Fondazione C.G. Andreoli”, and solo guitar players in the Lybra Guitar Orchestra. The Bruskers have performed in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Hungary, and Portugal. They recorded their first cd in 2006, Blue Bruskers, a live collection of jazz and bossanova standards. They attend also some international guitar festival as "Arte a 6 Corde", "San Benedetto Po Guitar Festival" and "Acoustic Franciacorta".
In July 2009 the Bruskers presented their brand new work: a CD named Guitar Sketch, a musical sketch which takes famous jazz standards as its starting point and leads them to an unconventional and daring mixture of original rhythms, creative ideas and ingenious virtuosity. In 2010 the Italian label “Fingerpicking.net” has reprinted "Guitar Sketch".
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Tracks from Guitar Sketch can be heard on the streaming audio program
Mark S. Tucker - FAME - AcousticMusic.com (U.S.A.)
A really well integrated guitar duo can often outdo quartets such as, oh, the L.A. Guitar Quartet, whose arrangements frequently are lackluster or leave the players stepping on each other's feet…er, frets. The Bruskers are just such a superior twosome. Eugenio Polacchini and Matteo Minozzi present, in their own satirical words, "unconventional new snob jazz ideas" that are anything but snobby, instead bright and energetic, playful and intelligent, as well as, yes, unconventional (in the sense of extending interplay, trade-offs, deviations) and lightly fusionized—in other words, everything you'd hoped to hear when laying hands on the LAGQ, whose fidelity to the moribundities of the classical realm tend to smother. The Bruskers canon is a book of jazz standards and not-so-standards, plus a cut written by Polacchini. Latinate rhythms predominate as the seasoning of choice, thus we hear Bonfa's immortal Black Orpheus and Velazquez's Besame Mucho while bouncing over to the style Al Di Meola took when forsaking his Return to Forever days—travel, in other words, to world musics, though there's quite a same degree of the ingenuity shown in Guitar Sketch that was demonstrated in the work Al did with McLaughlin and DeLucia as well. Every so often, Kessell and Herb Ellis pop up, as in Little Piece in C for U, but I suspect Polacchini & Minozzi are rounded in their listening diets, as I hear Coryell, Byrd, Catherine, Hall, and others, even hot jazz (All of Me). The recording of Guitar Sketch is absolutely crystalline, every single note pure and undistorted, shining and effervescent, and the two gents' approach is damn near that of jam bands but with a finessy knowingness most such ensembles are thoroughly incapable of, hence my reference to light fusion (which, frankly, is here more than light but not of the wild 70s Brit fusioneers or Miles). The balance of the core of the originals when weighed against the pair's interpretations is engrossing and striking. Not Tomorrow, should he hear it, will delight Ralph Towner, whose unique posture is well echoed here, and Take 5 departs significantly from the charts while adding a page to the song's immortality…but then, every cut of Sketch is a finely faceted diamond of modern craft and intelligence. [FAME] [close]
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