In cerca di cibo ("in search of nourishment") is the first ECM album by the duo of clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi and accordionist Gianni Coscia. It is a record about roots: North Italian folk song and dance, film and theatre music, a jazz standard and an old tango. Two old friends play it with tenderness and a good deal of irony. ECM's own pages later called it the label's "runaway surprise hit of 2001".
Trovesi comes from Nembro, near Bergamo, and Coscia from Alessandria, towns on either side of Milan. Coscia worked as a lawyer for many years, keeping music on the side. The pair recorded in February 1999 at Radio Studio DRS in Zürich, with Manfred Eicher producing and Markus Heiland as engineer. Trovesi plays piccolo, alto and bass clarinets. The booklet carries an essay by Umberto Eco, also from Alessandria, who recalls that Coscia's accordion was his first initiation into jazz in the Italy of the 1950s.
Seven of the fifteen tracks are by the Milanese composer Fiorenzo Carpi, including fragments of his score for Luigi Comencini's Le avventure di Pinocchio. His title theme opens and closes the album. The Modern Jazz Quartet's Django, by John Lewis, is brought back to European folk roots and joined to a Jewish melody. In the tango El Choclo Trovesi's clarinet adds an almost klezmer flourish. Luis Bacalov's theme from Il Postino is one of the restrained pieces early in the programme, and the two players contribute originals such as Celebre Mazurka alterata.
The record was placed on the quarterly list of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik and was CD of the Month in Stereoplay. In the Tages-Anzeiger, Thomas Bodmer called it "das bisher musikantischste aller ECM-Alben", the most musicianly ECM album so far. Manfred Papst wrote in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the music can be heard as a clever game of quotations from classical, folk and popular song, or simply enjoyed without decoding anything. Eco's essay makes a similar point, describing a play of references that sets up expectations in the listener and then changes the rules.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1703, first released in April 2000, with a 16-page booklet containing Eco's essay in Italian, English, German and French.
