Circular Motion

Seattle-based Italian pianist and composer Francesco Crosara has selected ten of his compositions from the last 40 years to highlight the connection between the early works, with their simplicity and youthful appeal, and the later works, in which he expressed richer harmonic structures and possibilities.

The influences of his early mentors Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as those of his birthplace Milan and the city where he grew up, Rome, his move to the USA and his studies from 1981 at the University of Southern California, are ever present.

Not to forget the strong influence of his mother, Lilian Terry (1930-2023), an important European jazz singer who played with all the American jazz greats in the 1960s.

Three different rhythm sections bring his music to life, each of them adding different sound textures and rhythmic vitality to the whole.

This makes sense because Crosara defines the album as a retrospective, exploring and reinventing himself in different musical stages and compositions of his life and over 40 years of making music.

Bassist Clipper Anderson and drummer Mark Ivester swing and float; the vibrating groove of electric bassist Farko Dosumov and drummer D'Vonne Lewis give the music a modern swing; and the youthful eclecticism of bassist Osama Afifi and drummer Xavier Lecouturier adds another dimension.

Francesco Crosara is and remains true to himself, but the different trios still allow different timbres to be heard and the album remains sensitive and entertaining at every moment. As if he wanted to say the same thing in different languages.

Translated from German
https://www.kultur-port.de/kolumne/klassik/19091-francesco-crosara-circular-motion.html