Genuine Swing An Album Review of Genuinely Radiosuccessi by Radiosuccessi by Emiliano Beltzer
W
hen I think of jazz, I think of the United States, African-American culture, and the complexity and musical virtuosity that are characteristic of the genre. However, since its appearance at the beginning of the last century, jazz has taken many different forms in different parts of the world. Wherever jazz arrived, it mixed with the pre-existing local culture, giving rise to new musical forms (such as bossa nova) or to new versions of American jazz with a different, original local “colour”. Radiosuccessi plays music that could be included in this last category.
24 ART & CULTURE
The group was created by legendary drummer, the late Carlo Canevali, who wanted to play Italian music with fellow Italian jazz musicians in Melbourne. Apart from Canevali on drums, the original line-up included Mirko Guerrini on sax, piano, flute and arrangements, Ilaria Croatiani on vocals and Ryan Griffith on guitar and clarinet. The text accompanying their first album, Mr Amore (Independent, 2016) explains that the band “pays tribute to” Italy and to the particular atmosphere that pervades movies like La Dolce Vita or Vacanze Romane, their music being “a nod and a wink” to those cheerful 1950s and 1960s when swing music was at its apex on radio and TV. After the tragic passing of Carlo Canevali in 2019, the music he imagined continues, now with Tom Lee on double bass and Niko Schäuble on drums replacing Canevali. Genuinely Radiosuccessi (2020) was recorded in a single day, at Pughouse Studio. The album has various sounds, from the swing to which it pays homage, to rock and roll, through to European folk, circus music and even soundscape. The tracks Amorevole, and Eccomi, despite having their own arrangements, have a sound that retains a relative closeness to the original versions. In Tua, however (a beautiful version with which the album ends), the arrangement changes from the original not only in its texture, which is present-
Segmento Issue XXII • March-May 2021
