Wednesday 15 January 2014

ADM - Arena di Tollo Marras (2012)



ADM is a three letter name for the cooperation between Adriano Arena, Maurizio di Tollo and Christian Marras. All of them have decades of experiences from various Italian prog rock bands. Maurizio di Tollo also have a very good solo album which I have reviewed too.

ADM is therefore a gathering of those three talents where they do something entirely different from what they do in their daytime jobs. We are here deep into jazz land. Well, maybe fusion. But I feel most of the material here is pure jazz. Not in the Dixieland tradition, but more in the sole guitarist backed up by bass and drums. This is very much a guitarist, bass and drums trio. Though helped out by some synths too played by the guitarist.

The music comes in three chapters, more or less. One for each musician here. One of the chapters is loud and orchestral in the fusion vein. The two other chapters are very laid-back and understated. The guitarist Adriano is using both acoustic, half acoustic and electric guitar. He is very much setting the tone here. The other two does a very good job on their respective instruments too.

This is a forty minutes long album and a pretty stylish one too. It does lack enough good tracks to make this more than just background noise for someone like me who are not an all out jazz fan. This is more music for the jazz crowd than anyone else. I like a couple of tracks here and that is really it. This is a decent to good album which does not hit me home. Fans of the MoonJune bands should check this out despite of this album being released on the Italian label Mellow Records.

2.5 points

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