Marco Pacassoni: Hands & Mallets

Enzo Bocciero is an Italian pianist, keyboard player and composer active in jazz and related musical settings. A long-standing member of the Marco Pacassoni Quartet, he shares a close artistic partnership with vibraphonist and marimba player Marco Pacassoni. Their duo recording Hands & Mallets brings together their original compositions, an adaptation of Bach and a tribute to Italian song, with particular attention to interplay, accompaniment and the relationship between melodic and percussive instruments.

Marco Pacassoni is an Italian vibraphonist, marimba player and composer from Fano. A Berklee College of Music graduate, he studied with musicians including Gary Burton, Ed Saindon and Victor Mendoza. His work combines jazz, composition and teaching, and his recordings range from original quartet music to the Frank & Ruth tribute to Frank Zappa and Ruth Underwood. His long collaboration with pianist Enzo Bocciero also led to the duo album Hands & Mallets.

Enzo Bocciero is an Italian pianist, keyboard player and composer active in jazz and related musical settings. A long-standing member of the Marco Pacassoni Quartet, he shares a close artistic partnership with vibraphonist and marimba player Marco Pacassoni. Their duo recording Hands & Mallets brings together their original compositions, an adaptation of Bach and a tribute to Italian song, with particular attention to interplay, accompaniment and the relationship between melodic and percussive instruments.

Johann Sebastian Bach: (b Eisenach, 21 March 1685, d Leipzig; 28 July 1750). Composer and organist. The most important member of the family, his genius combined outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative powers in which forceful and original inventiveness, technical mastery and intellectual control are perfectly balanced. While it was in the former capacity, as a keyboard virtuoso, that in his lifetime he acquired an almost legendary fame, it is the latter virtues and accomplishments, as a composer, that by the end of the 18th century earned him a unique historical position. His musical language was distinctive and extraordinarily varied, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, the styles and the general achievements of his own and earlier generations and leading on to new perspectives which later ages have received and understood in a great variety of ways.
The first authentic posthumous account of his life, with a summary catalogue of his works, was put together by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and his pupil J.F. Agricola soon after his death and certainly before March 1751 (published as Nekrolog, 1754). J.N. Forkel planned a detailed Bach biography in the early 1770s and carefully collected first-hand information on Bach, chiefly from his two eldest sons; the book appeared in 1802, by when the Bach Revival had begun and various projected collected editions of Bach’s works were underway; it continues to serve, together with the 1754 obituary and the other 18th-century documents, as the foundation of Bach biography.

Marco Pacassoni is an Italian vibraphonist, marimba player and composer from Fano. A Berklee College of Music graduate, he studied with musicians including Gary Burton, Ed Saindon and Victor Mendoza. His work combines jazz, composition and teaching, and his recordings range from original quartet music to the Frank & Ruth tribute to Frank Zappa and Ruth Underwood. His long collaboration with pianist Enzo Bocciero also led to the duo album Hands & Mallets.

Maurizio Fabrizio is an Italian composer, arranger and musician. Trained at the Milan Conservatory, he has worked with leading Italian singers and written songs, film music and stage works. His songs include Almeno tu nell’universo, with lyrics by Bruno Lauzi, made famous by Mia Martini. His work combines melodic songwriting with a background in instrumental performance and arranging.