Driving Out... Birth of the Cool

Release of the new CD
Driving Out... Birth of the Cool
Flight Band (ensemble of 16 musicians)

Director: Biagio Coppa
Special Guest: Claudio Fasoli

If Biagio Coppa, in the making of this CD, had confined himself to merely proposing the remake of a jazz classic such as Miles Davis Birth of the Cool, his work would not have been as interesting as it is; it would have been similar to any of the many works produced over the last years with works and authors of the jazz tradition by many Italian jazz musicians who are clearly short of new ideas. But Biagio Coppa, who is a brilliant sax player and experimenter from Milan, pushes things even further. He is used to surgical-musical operations (one of his albums is titled Anastomosi) and assisted by his lab-orchestra he places Birth of The Cool on the operating table where he proceeds to dismantle, deconstruct it by tearing it into very small pieces. It is only at the end of this process that he tries to put its bits back together restoring a semblance of the songs that everybody knows, but what he really offers the listener is something totally new: a phantasmagoria of colours, rhythms, sounds where Davis is just a pretext and jazz alternates with concrete, serial, electronic, rock music and sometimes even with lounge music. One thing is sure: purists will turn up their nose. Someone will accuse Biagio of wanting to kill the father (in this case Miles) making him a mere pretext for a post-modern and self-referential operation. But if you allow yourself to be absorbed in the unpredictable and mysterious atmospheres of this album you will find out that it contains no intellectualistic or planned intention, that the musicians of the Flight Band (an orchestra of non-professional musicians that under Biagios guidance have reached an unexpected height), far from being frightened by a repressive and sullen conducting, actually enjoy it and enthusiastically contribute to the patchwork, matched in this by Biagio Coppa with his sound painting and Claudio Fasoli, featured as special guest, who also play and have their share of fun.

So, just have fun and enjoy it!