Leaderless Quartet - We Concentrate on You: The Music of Cole Porter - Hybrid Stereo SACD

2024

This album is part of the recordings that Giulio Cesare made on the occasion of the concerts of the fonè Music Festival Piaggio edition 2022 organized by Cesare himself.

The location chosen is the Piaggio Auditorium located inside the famous Pontedera Museum, the place where Piaggio was born and where it still continues to produce today. In this album the protagonists are four extraordinary musicians: Gabriele Mirabassi (clarinet), Fulvio Sigurtà (trumpet), Enzo Pietropaoli (double bass) and Marcello Di Leonardo (drums).

The album contains 10 tracks: tracks 1 to 8 are by the American composer Cole Porter, track 9 "Line for Lyons" is by J. Mulligan and track 10 is a very original interpretation of the "Inno d'Italia."

The quartet was born in September 2022 on the occasion of the concerts of the fonè Music Festival, adhering to the invitation of Giulio Cesare Ricci who wanted to propose and record a new project with Mirabassi and Pietropaoli, two musicians with whom he had already collaborated in different contexts in the past.

The band is completed by Fulvio Sigurtà and Marcello Di Leonardo, an original formation composed of musicians who have shared numerous artistic experiences in the past.

The desire to propose a "pianoless quartet" is the consequence of the need to work without a harmonic instrument, considering each instrument an autonomous, monophonic voice that, thanks to counterpoint and interplay, builds harmony in a less conventional and more extemporaneous way.

The voices move on an equal footing, without hierarchies, hence the name "Leaderless Quartet." The two most significant influences of this formation in the history of jazz are represented by the "pianoless quartets" of Jerry Mulligan and Ornette Coleman, the first more traditional and the second more innovative.

For this debut it was chosen to pay homage to the great Cole Porter, one of the most important and beloved composers by musicians and in particular by jazz musicians, who for almost a century, have played and improvised on his now very famous pieces.

For this recording Giulio Cesare Ricci brought all his equipment, both analog (Ampex ATR 102 Electronic Tube Ampex Model 351-1965, 2 tracks, ½", 30ips modified by David Manley) and digital (Pyramix Recorder, dCS A/D and D/A converters). As for the microphones, he used his original collection of Neumann U47, U48, M49 in addition to the Signoricci microphone preamplifier and cables. Pairs of Neumann valve microphones from 1947 and 1949 (U47, U48 and M49) with a very natural timbre are used using bi-microphone field effect techniques.

These microphones have an important history: they are in fact the original microphones used to record, among others, the Beatles' performances at the Abbey Road Studio and by RCA for the "Living Stereo" recordings. The sound that Giulio Cesare Ricci manages to capture with these legendary microphones is perfectly in line with his sonic taste. No other microphone has such a true timbre and the ability to record all the nuances of sound and all the richness of the harmonics.

The uniqueness of these microphones is linked to their ability to perform a perfect "sound photograph" and to place the music perfectly in the sound space chosen for recording. This is because for each recording Giulio Cesare Ricci creates two Masters: an analog master for vinyl and a DSD digital master for SuperAudioCD as in this case. For this SACD he used the DSD format, on Pyramix using the dCS A/D and D/A DSD converters.

From 1998 to today he has recorded in DSD 64 x 44.1 bit with Signoricci ex Philips workstations that mount Pyramix programs, dCS analog/digital converters 904 and dCS digital/analog converters 954, all this to best realize the SACD fonè.

The mastering of the SACD was done using the entirely analog and valve Signoricci system.

A "state of the art" system without sound manipulation, equalization, reverb, compression and expansion... but natural sound and true timbre to best enhance the acoustics of the Auditorium of the Piaggio Museum. All this to create recordings characterized by technological refinement and aimed at recovering the original musical atmospheres.

Also for this recording Ricci used a "field effect" recording technique... all this to make the listener relive in his home hi-fi system, the live effect as if he had been present at the performance.