Flavio Cucchi plays Chick Corea and works by Borghese, Gismonti, Clementi and Duarte

Flavio Cucchi plays Chick Corea

and works by Borghese, Gismonti, Clementi and Duarte

Chick COREA (1941-2021)

Children's Songs (arr. F. Cucchi for 2 guitars) (excerpts)

Ruminations

Alfonso BORGHESE (b.1945)

Habanera d'Autunno

Egberto GISMONTI (b.1947)

Agua e Vinho (arr. F. Cucchi for 3 guitars)

Giulio CLEMENTI (b.1950)

3 Danze da Balera

John W. DUARTE (1919-2004)

English Suite No.1, Op.31

Flavio Cucchi (Guitars)

 

Chick Corea (1941-2021) one of the world’s finest jazz pianists and keyboardists, in the course of his long career he has won 22 GRAMMY® Awards and worked with many of the greats from the 1960s onwards, including Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola, Bobby McFerrin and John McLaughlin.

I was lucky enough to get to know Chick Corea in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and we’ve met up often since then, in the US, Italy and the UK. Although I’m not a jazz musician, we’ve occasionally played together and always spend a lot of time talking about the different approaches and mentalities needed for classical and jazz music. Since 2000 he’s dedicated a series of works to me—the Six Ruminations for guitar. I’ve performed them many times on tour around the world and have recorded a new version of them for this album.

Originally written for piano between 1972 and 1980, Children’s Songs is a series of short pieces written in a varied and very original idiom which is hard to pigeonhole as either classical, contemporary or jazz. Both jazz and classical pianists have made them their own.

In a way, they’re like musical haikus, inspired by the magical, shifting, uncertain world of children. I really wanted to play them, but few of them lent themselves to transcription for my instrument. Even where the process was possible, the results felt unnatural and didn’t flow well. I therefore decided to work them into transcriptions for two guitars. Of the 20 pieces, I chose the 12 I thought were best suited to the sonorities and range of the two instruments, and in almost all cases I was able to keep the original key. I showed my work to Corea, and he gave me some suggestions as well as his final approval. The apparent simplicity of these pieces disguises some intriguing polyrhythms and also leaves room for improvisation.

I haven’t got a permanent duo partner, so I’ve performed these pieces with different musicians in Europe, America and Asia. But when it came to recording them, I decided to make the most of the overdubbing technology available and record both parts myself. Generally speaking, I’m against this practice because the great thing about playing in a duo is being able to exchange ideas and create something original with another musician. But in this case, after putting so much work into the transcriptions, I decided to put myself to the test. Given the variety of idioms in the different pieces, I had to come up with a range of strategies to keep the music full of life and flowing along convincingly as I played first one part, then the other.

The Six Ruminations, dedicated to me, are the only pieces Chick Corea has so far written expressly for guitar. I edited them and worked out the fingerings. Improvisatory in style, with highly virtuosic moments, they too are hard to classify as one genre or another. After transcribing Children’s Songs, an experience which helped me familiarise myself even more with Corea’s writing, I revisited my first version of Ruminations and made a few changes, and now the transcriptions more faithfully reflect his original intentions.

This is what Corea himself says about these pieces: ‘In hearing a musician of such ability and creativeness as Flavio, I of course became inspired to write music for him and his guitar. At the time I was already working on a piece for guitar as an experiment—these were later named Ruminations. I played my demo/keyboard recording of these pieces for Flavio and showed him the music and he became intent on making them sound wonderful on his guitar. We got together several times to develop the idea—and after a few times, Flavio had created a complete metamorphosis of taking these piano-like pieces and making them into guitar performances. The resultant recording is very exciting for me to hear—to see my idea realised with such high artistry.’

Habanera d’Autunno is a lovely, delicate piece for solo guitar written quite recently by my friend the eclectic artist, composer, conductor and guitarist Alfonso Borghese (b. 1945). Borghese has composed a lot of incidental music for stage works by Brecht, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Feydeau, Nando Vitali and Carlo Martinelli, as well as writing the musical Polly, ovvero l’opera del milionario (text by Stefano Martinelli). He’s also performed live all over the world, both as a soloist and as a member of the Trio Chitarristico Italiano.

The composer himself has said the following about this work: ‘Habanera d’Autunno recalls the art of Edward Hopper—the nocturnal scenes and lonely portraits of his paintings. It’s a slow, halting dance rhythm, that shifts in melancholy fashion between two contrasting themes in an entirely problem-free language.’

Brazilian composer Egberto Gismonti (b. 1947) is one of the most highly regarded and original figures in modern music. Classically trained, he studied composition in Paris with the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who also taught such giants of the music world as Bernstein, Gershwin, Piazzolla, Copland, Daniel Barenboim and Philip Glass. Gismonti has since followed his own path, experimenting with new sonorities, using folk instruments, designing new kinds of guitars with more than six strings, and immersing himself in a range of genres, from progressive rock to fusion, among others.

Agua e Vinho (‘Water and Wine’) began life in 1972 as a song with lyrics by Geraldo Carneiro which gave its name to one of Gismonti’s most successful albums and to one of his innovative jazz-prog-rock shows. Many transcriptions have been made of this song—a simple piece of writing, but full of intensity and charm. My version is for two guitars, with a brief intervention by a third.

Because I wanted to gain more experience in overdubbing and carry on working outside the strictly classical world, I asked my friend Giulio Clementi (b. 1950) to write something for this album. Giulio is an incredibly versatile man: a talented artist as well as a composer, arranger and producer who straddles the worlds of pop, jazz and classical music. Seen as one of the pioneers of the technological revolution, he has written widely on digital innovation in music.

The Tre danze da balera (‘Three Dance Hall Dances’: Tango, Slow Waltz and Slow Fox) are lovely pieces to play: their idiom is traditional and they conjure up the atmosphere of the dance halls of bygone days. Clementi describes them as ‘a journey into my memories of my first teenage love affairs by the sea…’.

John Duarte (1919–2004) is the only composer featured on this album who was primarily active in the classical field, although he had no formal musical education. Hugely prolific, Duarte wrote more than 150 works for guitar—solo and in various formations—in a variety of styles, and did a great deal to promote the guitar, publishing books and articles on the instrument.

Written for Andrés Segovia, whom Duarte met in 1947, the English Suite is the first and most successful in a series of six works of the same name. It is divided into three movements (Prelude, Folk Song and Round Dance), each of which seamlessly combines an English folk tune with original thematic material.

Flavio Cucchi

Translated by Susannah Howe