Mondongo

2011 release ** "Canadian drummer André Michel Arraiz-Rivas is a versatile guy, one who you find grinding out prog with Quasiviri and post-folk ghosts with Ronin, just to name a few. Then he happens to be seized by the urge for jazz, and here he is, whipping together a made in Italy quartet, calling it Mondongo – like a traditional hypercaloric South American soup – and releasing an album that will make your ears prick up. Transparent Skin – this is the title – is eight tracks plus one (ghost) in the name of very groovy modern jazz, two saxes – Piero Bittolo Bon's alto and Francesco Bigoni's tenor – to paint warm, flexible and thoughtful melodies on the rhythmic texture that is sometimes tight, sometimes sinuous and never banal, woven by Arraiz-Rivas with Giacomo Papetti's electric bass. Wayne Shorter's cinematic lyricism and Steve Coleman's angular immediacy are the declared references, the result is a post-bop that winks at improvisation with a longing for new directions, preferring an engaging physicality to abstraction, whose aesthetic horizon is not foreign to more or less homeopathic hip-hop movements (Our Connection, Unconcurred). It is not often that you come across such contemporary jazz."