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Roberto Bonati

A Silvery Silence: Fragments from

Moby Dick MM Records MM43036

Composer/bassist Roberto Bonati had been creating ambitious music for the ParmaJazz Frontiere Orchestra since 1998, when he wrote a Gershwin-songs project, I Loves You, Porgy, followed among others by a couple of literary projects, one a tribute to poet Attilio Bertolucci, another (The Blanket of the Dark) inspired by Lady Macbeth.

A Silvery Silence is a rich, allusive, complex piece inspired by that richest and most allusive and complex work, Herman Melville's Bible-haunted, enigmatic classic, Moby Dick. Singer Lucia Minetti is on hand again, both to sing and to recite Melville's text; the work also contains chanted Hebrew (Riccardo Joshua Moretti), passages of Polynesian music and a Sicilian fishermen's song, all uncontrivedly woven into a dense, affecting musical meditation on the book's many themes: faith, awe, destiny etc.

If this makes the music sound dauntingly intellectual or abstruse, though, it's misleading; Bonati is a highly skilled writer for an orchestra that moves effortlessly between 'jazz' and 'classical' music, rendering the apparent distinction between the two genres meaningless, and the resultant composition refuses to allow itself to be stifled by its programmatic duties, cleverly balancing composed and improvised elements in a wonderfully vibrant, many-hued whole.

Recorded live in Parma, in December 2003, this is another triumph for a unique compositional talent.