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Bandra West
"All the languages that revolve around an idea of contemporary jazz, increasingly omnivorous and all-encompassing, come from the four cardinal points of sound knowledge, where metalanguages, genres, subgenres and styles of every order and degree meet. Sometimes the gravitational nucleus of a project is Africa, but more and more often, the spotted and zebra-striped jazz of the third millennium points its nose to the East, towards a glimpse of Asia, where voices, noises, rhythms, buzzes, songs, prayers, non-transcribed harmonic codes mix producing a mystical-rhythmic exhalation that sucks in fragments of jazz, flakes of rock and discharges of electronics, in which ancient and modern, sacred and profane, obverse and obverse establish new and unprecedented rules of engagement. «Bandra West», the recent trio album by Raffaele Matta, a talented guitarist and composer sui generis, intersects on border lines that touch distant lands, moving from his native Sardinia, already in itself a land of confluences, towards other sonic civilizations and human. Thus India, Vietnam, Japan and Thailand become the ideal cultivation ground, in which Raffaele Matta, accompanied by the drummer Nicola Vacca and the bassist Andrea Parodo, grafts the seeds of a polygenetic and musically articulated creativity
Published on the Sicilian label Isulafactory in co-production with Lizard Records of Treviso, the album, «Bandra West», is inspired in its title by a neighborhood of Mumbai, a city familiar to the three musicians, in which they often performed, gathering input, suggestions and stimuli, for their compositions which often become real imaginative frescoes linked to those places full of mysticism and music based on a dissonant chordal set on which the melodies seem to float creating an aura of suspension and enchantment. A demonstration of this is the opening track "Dehli" which develops cyclically, like an ostinato, in which the rhythm seems to roll giving the idea of the breadth and chaos of megacities crowded with hasty people who move in an almost cadenced manner, while the guitar produces an inevitable atmosphere halfway between religiosity and restlessness. The album is made up of eight compositions filled with emotional elements, visual flashes and landscape views that become a bridge between traditional Indian music and an adaptive form of contemporary jazz. The second track of the album «Japan» is based precisely on the contrasts between the hidden sounds of ancient vestiges and the massive use of electronics which produces a sort of assisted pedaling in the sound flow which makes the rhythmic-harmonic path frictionless . «1012» is just an acronym, but these numbers have their own sound cabal which expresses itself in a progressive ballad, in which the guitar seems to emerge from the underground and start towards a gradual crescendo: a liberating act sustained and signed in the presence of a notary from bass and drums.
The rhythmic approach, based on a numerical system for building patterns, allows the drums to improvise freely within a rhythmic progression, at times taking on the characteristics of a front-line instrument capable of producing melody on a harmonic structure. This compositional and executive concept finds ample confirmation in «Floor Scrubbers», almost an apotropaic dance dictated by a percussive, cyclical and recyclical groove, which secretes a sort of urban-funk containing the typical moods of an oriental metropolis. «Hanoi» unfolds on a carpet of more meditative and elegiac sounds in the same way as a poignant ballad, in which the guitar becomes a perfect narrator. On the other hand, «Chiang Mai» immediately highlights variations or humoral and thematic variables, proposing a more documentary expressive form. The last two tracks of the album, «The Music Book» and «UAE», are a kind of homecoming. The East gets closer to the West, while the sounds become closer to a stripped-down rock of the post-punk-under-pressure type, where the guitar twists and distorts in a more decisive way, while the scents and nuances of the lifting they slowly disperse in the air, fading into vague Central European suggestions. «Bandra West» by the Raffaele Matta Trio is a truly progressive concept, in which the individual compositions are always linked by the same creative and executive mood, like the long sequence shot of a film that tells of an evocative journey between East and West."
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