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Leila Olivesi Quartet (featuring David Binney)
Utopia (Jazz and People JPCD 815002)
IT’S not customary for a jazz musician to record an album directly inspired by a 17th-century philosopher. Freethinking author and polemicist, but Leila Olivesi’s Utopia is just that.
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) the philosopher, was not the character created in the late 19th century play by Edmond Rostand, but the writer of the posthumously published The States and Empires of the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun, jointly titled The Other World. I don’t know whether Sun Ra of Birmingham, Alabama, the first iconoc jazz space traveller and man of Saturn, ever read de Bergerac’s works, but with his Arkestra he imagined a soundscape in the stars, a universe which Olivesi forms and creates in an entirely contrary way with this album.
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