Album: Hommage à Jon Hassell by Lorenzo Cimino

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Lorenzo Cimino’s latest studio release is a 4-part composition influenced and inspired by American master jazz trumpet player Jon Hassel, where Cimino fully embodies his instrument in a series of equally harrowing and gorgeous musical pieces centered around the emotive and expressive capabilities of the instrument.

Trumpeter and composer Lorenzo Cimino is based in the Italian town of La Spezia. An academic in trumpet jazz composition, Cimino’s sound on the instrument is effortless and fluent, displayed in a stunning dynamic range to his deliveries as well as in graceful phrasing that makes listening to his compositions easy and enjoyable even to the least initiated. 

Carrying his influences on his sleeve, Cimino’s ‘Hommage à Jon Hassell’ is a dedication to the masterful Jon Hassell, one of jazz’s greats when the instrument is concerned. Paying respect to Hassell’s search for a timbre capable of resonating with the human condition, Cimino’s pieces on this record immerse the listeners in different and varied landscapes, from jungles and deserts, to supermarkets. There’s little more than the man’s trumpet and its overdubs to populate the entirety of this set of compositions, yet what Cimino manages to achieve, haunting, chill, eerie, and noir, using only one instrument, defies belief. 

From the musical sputters that trail off on the first cut, to the precarious phrases interspersed with howling primates on ‘Soffio al cuore’ to the Victorian industrial landscapes of ’Il grande viaggio’, and the chilling chopped voices on ‘Search for a new world’ Cimino crafts meticulous sonic paintings using the expressive range of his instrument, and a very smart use of samples.

Cimino’s ‘Hommage à Jon Hassell’ is an album of mature and calculated experimental jazz that is going to be, while off putting to some people by definition, easy to appreciate and enjoy to the larger majority, courtesy of Cimino’s fluidity as a trumpeter, and of his lush vision as an arranger and a composer.