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- As a rule, while planning the program of the
little festival I organize in Tortona every year, I tend to leave
one of the three dates free, because you never know: I might miss
out on some juicy opportunity. However, in 2007 time was running out
and the notorious third evening still hadn't been organized and in
spite of my many attempts in various directions, nothing definite
seemed to be appearing on the horizon.
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- It was in this situation – frankly a bit
worrying – that one evening Borah Bergman, an old friend of mine I
hadn't heard from for years, called me from New York to tell me he
was launching a duo with Stefano Pastor, a young violinist from
Genoa, and that he would be willing to perform with him in Italy
that summer. He told me that Stefano would call me, and he soon did.
I only knew him by name, but he had excellent references and so,
also considering the great esteem I have always held for Borah
Bergman, I couldn’t help but be interested. In any case neither
Borah nor Stefano knew that I organize my own festival, so they had
called me mainly because they wanted some advice about contacts or
festivals they could propose themselves to.
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- Things then went another way, and it was
precisely my own little festival, Jazz
fuori tema, that
included the duo's very first concert, an unforgettable evening
after which Stefano and Borah stayed in Tortona for three days,
rehearsing, discussing, and getting to know each other. The RAI
(Radio Televisione Italiana), thanks to our friend Pino Saulo,
broadcast the recording you’ll find on this CD, with some
necessary cuts (the concert lasted in fact a bit less than an hour
and a half).
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- The music is sometimes rasping, sometimes
lyrical, a not rarely prodigious dialogue between the piano and the
violin, with Borah’s hands running about on the keyboard producing
cascades of notes, each
with an exact, determined precision with its own very limpid
specific weight. Stefano Pastor plays the game wonderfully,
intervening with his violin with its sanded, gravelly, very earthy
sound. Homage is paid to Arrigo Polillo, with Spirit
Song, dedicated
by Borah Bergman after the death of the great Italian critic (summer
1984), a probably never-to-be-seen-again figure that even I, at the
time a young contributor to the magazine he used to edit, Musica
Jazz, had the
chance to know and appreciate (it is worth noting that Polillo was
the first to bring Borah to Italy). And then there are the passages
born then and there, on that stage, in an interchange with no
hesitation and no sparing of creative energy. About all of this
words count no more, because – as I have always stated - music
speaks for itself. Here more than ever.
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- Alberto Bazzurro
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Art Director Jazz
fuori Tema
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- (English
translation by Paola Torre)
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