This Is The Day is the second ECM album by the Giovanni Guidi Trio, the Italian pianist's group with the American bassist Thomas Morgan and the Portuguese drummer João Lobo. It continues the line of City of Broken Dreams, released in 2013, with pensive, abstract ballads that carry an inner tension. All three players have a keen sense of how sound and silence answer each other, and the piano trio is loosened from inside rather than broken open.
The album was recorded in April 2014 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo of RSI in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Guidi was thirty when it came out. He had come to notice through Enrico Rava, who took him into his groups after hearing him at the Siena Jazz summer school. Nine of the twelve pieces are his. The others are Lobo's Baiiia, the standard I'm Through With Love and Quizás, quizás, quizás. That song is by the Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farrés, known to jazz listeners above all through Nat King Cole.
The opening Trilly sets the tone with brushed cymbals, spacious bass and a rubato melody, and comes back near the end as Trilly var. Lobo seldom keeps or accents the beat, and Morgan often plays melody or obbligato lines, so the pulse is left for Guidi to imply. Where They'd Lived, over ten minutes long, is the centrepiece, a slow unfolding of a yearning theme in a Spanish-tinged minor colour. The Cobweb begins with plucked piano strings and grows into a dense, almost frantic texture. The closing The Night It Rained Forever rests on Morgan's sustained arco and recurring piano tremolos.
The American press was warm. In JazzTimes, where the album was an Editor's Pick, Michael J. West called it "music of great audacity, even brilliance". Bob Doerschuk wrote in DownBeat that "just about every moment of This Is The Day is gorgeous". In Stereophile, Thomas Conrad compared Morgan's role in the trio to that of Scott LaFaro with Bill Evans. In London, Adrian Pallant of London Jazz News heard a kinship with the restraint of Tord Gustavsen and Ketil Bjørnstad.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2403, first released on 20 March 2015.
