Francesco Zampini

The slow tempo is – as no jazz fan will fail to notice – the most treacherous bend in this language, dangerously teetering between heart and boredom and, in truth, with more stories of shipwrecks than successes. That is the challenge, which is increasingly avoided in the name of enchanting acrobatics, from which the musician’s nobility seems to derive: in ballads there is no margin for repairing mistakes, uncertainties, interruptions in the narrative flow, and it is a challenge that Zampini wins hands down, bringing the metronome beat to 50, the threshold for bradycardia in medicine, making a broad modal theme sparkle after the guitar-only intro, whispered in dynamic ranges between piano and pianissimo.

Paolo Romano