Label: Schema

ライブラリーからジャズ、ブラジル音楽、レトロラウンジまで幅広く復刻を行うミラノSchema Recordsカタログ!!典型的なヨーロッパの60年/70年代のジャズの影響を受け数多くの映画音楽を制作、世界的にも有名であるローマの作曲家Piero Umiliani。氏の重要作である[Africa]から3年後の1975年に出版、同コンセプトのもう一つの側面として制作されたのが本作[Continente Nero]。フェラ・クティ、またデヴィッド・トゥープのフィールドレコーディング、アート・アンサンブル・オブ・シカゴ、ジョン・コルトレーンらのインスピレーションを自由な形で落とし込んだ、非常に刺激的な表現が満載。









Released in 1975, “Continente Nero” is the perfect flip side of “Africa” (1972), an album that significantly expanded Piero Umiliani’s music perspectives, incorporating partially explored rhythmic variations already used in “Percussioni ed Effetti Speciali” and “To-Day’s Sound”. It does so by taking inspiration from a tradition that starts from the divine Fela Kuti and reaches the amateur and field recordings by musicologists such as David Toop, but also from the Afro-American jazz history of Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Coltrane, Max Roach and hundreds of others.

CONTINENTE NERO (1975)
Released via the Omicron label in 1975, three years after Africa, Continente Nero is the perfect flip side of an album that significantly expanded Piero Umiliani’s music perspectives, incorporating partially explored rhythmic variations already used in records such as Percussioni ed Effetti Speciali and To-Day’s Sound or experimenting new solutions that drew from a musical heritage little known at the time such as the African one.
Without bothering with the usual alias M. Zalla, Umiliani reveal his birth name and surname for a second foray into a territory that pays homage to an entire continent. And it does so by taking inspiration not only from a tradition that starts from the divine Fela Kuti and reaches the amateur and field recordings by musicologists such as David Toop, invaluable documents of an artistic heritage still today almost impossible to map in its complexity, but also from the Afro-American jazz history by Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Coltrane, Max Roach and hundreds of others.
It sounds clear in tracks such as Nuovi Fermenti, Rivoluzionari, Riscossa or Ultimo Stregone that show Umiliani’s extraordinary ability to grab a distant tradition essential traits and put them effortlessly into a personal imaginary world, as much exciting as the original one.