Fabrizio Cucco guides one of the most elegant and enveloping albums of the year in Tempo Fermo, which finds the bassist and his ensemble accompanying the Italian singer and frequent Louis Andriessen collaborator Cristina Zavalloni. Endowed with a fine mezzo-soprano, Zavalloni cites Sarah Vaughn, Joni Mitchell and Cassandra Wilson as formative influences while she also evokes Cathy Berberian and the great bel canto singers Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland.
Singing here with more of an old-school vibrato than on some of those efforts with Andriessen – whose own influences incorporated the dramatic bursts and crisp articulations of Igor Stravinsky, the minimalism of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley plus the sweep of big-band jazz – Cucco drapes her voice in a lush string section led by the violinist Marcello Sirignano, with Felipe Soso on the oboe and Maurizio Giammarco switching between the tenor and soprano saxophones as Sebastian Marino on keyboards and Alessandro Marzi behind the drums join Zavalloni and Cucco as part of the standard quartet.
The collaboration between Cucco and Zavalloni arose at the beginning of 2024 when the bassist asked the singer to write lyrics for one of his instrumental compositions, with the result appearing here as ‘Il Tempo Fermo’ the title piece. Their flourishing partnership soon spurred a full album’s worth of material. The exquisite album opener ‘Resto’ was written by Zavalloni and features the full flush of the whole ensemble while ‘Tempo’ is an interpretation of a tune by the singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla, with Cucco substantially reworking its melodic and harmonic aspects. ‘Piano Intro/Lo Spazio di uni Secondo’ meanwhile stands out for the electric whorls of Marino’s keys at the heart of a record aptly described as one which ‘stops time and sweeps listeners into a melodic dream’.
