Paolo Paliaga: Alboran Solo, The Wind Is Coming

Paolo Paliaga is a pianist and composer active on the Italian and international music scene with several ensembles. He has recorded around fifteen CDs with Alboran Trio, the Paolo Paliaga Quartet and Horizon Quartet. He studied jazz piano with Sante Palumbo, Arrigo Cappelletti and Enrico Pieranunzi.

He has composed soundtracks performed live for films including Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother and Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan (1924). During several years in France he collaborated with French musicians and recorded with the group Faena. His festival appearances include the London and Brecon jazz festivals, Roma Jazz Festival, the Bergamo and Padua jazz festivals, and the San Javier and Madrid jazz festivals.

With Alboran Trio he was selected among the eight finalists for the BMW Welt Jazz Award in Munich, and performed in Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Norway and Austria. The group recorded for the German label ACT. In 2008, critic Franco Fayenz described the trio as “the musical event of the year”. His collaborations include Enrico Rava, Barbara Casini, Gianni Basso and Ares Tavolazzi.

His work also encompasses solo piano concerts and appearances on RAI Radio 3’s Invenzioni a due voci, devised and presented by Pino Saulo. His musical exploration continues through Alboran Trio, solo piano and his piano duo with classical pianist Roberto Plano.

He holds a degree in Political Science from Milan and a doctorate in Sociology. His work brings together jazz, European musical traditions and African rhythmic influences. In 2020, Islands received the Gold Prize for Best Jazz Record from the Japanese magazine Jazz Hihyo. In 2022, with graphic artist Jesús de la Iglesia, he created Anthropocene, a performance combining live music with an animation of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Antônio Carlos [Tom] (Brasileiro de Almeida) Jobim,
(b Rio de Janeiro, 25 Jan 1927; d New York, 8 Dec 1994). Brazilian composer, pianist, guitarist and arranger. In his early teens he took piano lessons from Koellreutter and later from Branco and Tomás Terán, and also studied orchestration, harmony and composition. In the mid-1940s he began to work as a pianist in the bars and nightclubs of Rio's beach areas of Copacabana and Ipanema. In 1952 he worked as an arranger for the recording firm Continental and his first recorded pieces appeared in the following year. He became the artistic director for the Odeon label in 1956 and began a lifelong association with the poet Vinicius de Morais, composing and conducting the music for the play Orfeu da Conceição.

Charlie Haden (1937–2014) was an American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader. His work with Ornette Coleman helped establish a more independent, melodic role for the bass in collective improvisation.

In 1969 he founded the Liberation Music Orchestra, collaborating with arranger Carla Bley to bring experimental jazz into dialogue with political and folk song. He also worked extensively with Keith Jarrett. Haden founded the Jazz Studies programme at the California Institute of the Arts in 1982 and was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2012.

Cole (Albert) Porter
(b Peru, IN, 9 June 1891; d Santa Monica, CA, 15 Oct 1964). American songwriter. His parents were wealthy and his mother, Kate, an accomplished amateur pianist, arranged for him to learn violin from the age of six and piano from the age of eight at the Marion Conservatory, Indiana. Porter began writing melodies – The Bobolink Waltz (1902) for piano was his first published work – and contributed words and music for amateur shows at the Worcester (Massachusetts) Academy (1905–9) and for the Dramatic Club at Yale University (1909–13). He sang with and conducted the university glee club and wrote two songs, Bingo Eli Yale and Bulldog, which remained popular as Yale football songs. For a time he studied law, but in 1915–16 studied harmony and counterpoint at Harvard University. In 1915 two of his songs were performed on Broadway (‘Esmerelda’ in Hands Up and ‘Two Big Eyes’ in Miss Information) and in 1916 he had his first Broadway show, See America First, a ‘patriotic comic opera’ modelled on Gilbert and Sullivan; all these shows were failures.

Keith Jarrett,
(b Allentown, PA, 8 May 1945). American jazz pianist and composer. He began learning the piano at the age of three, and by the time he was seven had presented a full recital and was composing and improvising. He played professionally throughout his elementary school years, and during his teens toured for one season as piano soloist with Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians. In 1962 he moved to Boston, where he spent a year, on a scholarship, studying at Berklee College of Music. He then began working in the Boston area with his own trio and also with such visiting artists as Tony Scott and Roland Kirk. He moved to New York in 1965 but, having decided to avoid commercial work, was scarcely noticed until Art Blakey heard him during a jam session at the Village Vanguard. He joined Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in December of that year and stayed with them for four months, gaining critical notice and making his first recording with an established group, Buttercorn Lady (1966, Lml).

Paolo Paliaga is a pianist and composer active on the Italian and international music scene with several ensembles. He has recorded around fifteen CDs with Alboran Trio, the Paolo Paliaga Quartet and Horizon Quartet. He studied jazz piano with Sante Palumbo, Arrigo Cappelletti and Enrico Pieranunzi.

He has composed soundtracks performed live for films including Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother and Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan (1924). During several years in France he collaborated with French musicians and recorded with the group Faena. His festival appearances include the London and Brecon jazz festivals, Roma Jazz Festival, the Bergamo and Padua jazz festivals, and the San Javier and Madrid jazz festivals.

With Alboran Trio he was selected among the eight finalists for the BMW Welt Jazz Award in Munich, and performed in Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Norway and Austria. The group recorded for the German label ACT. In 2008, critic Franco Fayenz described the trio as “the musical event of the year”. His collaborations include Enrico Rava, Barbara Casini, Gianni Basso and Ares Tavolazzi.

His work also encompasses solo piano concerts and appearances on RAI Radio 3’s Invenzioni a due voci, devised and presented by Pino Saulo. His musical exploration continues through Alboran Trio, solo piano and his piano duo with classical pianist Roberto Plano.

He holds a degree in Political Science from Milan and a doctorate in Sociology. His work brings together jazz, European musical traditions and African rhythmic influences. In 2020, Islands received the Gold Prize for Best Jazz Record from the Japanese magazine Jazz Hihyo. In 2022, with graphic artist Jesús de la Iglesia, he created Anthropocene, a performance combining live music with an animation of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Pat(rick Bruce) Metheny
(b Lee’s Summit, MO, 12 Aug 1954). American jazz-fusion guitarist, composer and bandleader. He started on the trumpet, but at the age of 14 took up the guitar. In his late teens he enrolled at the University of Miami but was so proficient that he was appointed as a guitar instructor in his second semester. In 1973 he began teaching the guitar at the Berklee College of Music and in 1974 he joined Gary Burton’s group, at which point he took up the 12-string electric guitar to differentiate his sound from that of Burton’s other guitarist, Mick Goodrick. He left Burton in 1977 and formed a quartet that included the keyboard player and composer Lyle Mays, who has remained as Metheny’s longstanding associate into the 1990s. Away from the quartet, Metheny and Mays joined Joni Mitchell (1979), and Metheny spent two months in 1980 performing with the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, the double bass player Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. In 1981 he established a quintet that included Michael Brecker. In these settings Metheny has toured almost unceasingly, establishing a large and wide audience for his music. In the early 1990s he also toured and recorded in a quartet with Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, worked on other projects with Haden, Jim Hall and John Scofield, and with Holland and Roy Haynes.

Quilapayún is a Chilean ensemble founded in 1965 by Julio Numhauser and the brothers Julio and Eduardo Carrasco. Its name combines the Mapuche words for “three” and “beards”. The group became a leading voice of the Nueva Canción Chilena, drawing on folk instruments, vocal ensemble writing and socially engaged poetry.

Víctor Jara guided its early artistic development; Eduardo Carrasco later assumed musical direction. Its recordings include Luis Advis’s Cantata Santa María de Iquique (1970), alongside a repertoire that helped carry Chilean song to international audiences.

Sergio Ortega
(b Antofagasta, 2 Feb 1938). Chilean composer. At the age of 20 he abandoned architecture training for a career in music, studying composition with G.B. Schmidt and Roberto Falabella at the University of Chile. In 1969 he became a professor of composition there, taking over the artistic direction of the university television station the following year. Forced by political events to flee Chile in 1973, he settled in Paris, where he became director of the Ecole Nationale de Musique at Pantin.

Ortega's operas, songs, chamber music and film scores have been heard throughout Europe as well as in Chile. But he has reached his widest audience with his two political anthems Venceremos (‘We Shall Triumph’), composed in 1970 as the hymn for Salvador Allende's government, and El pueblo unido jamás será vencido (‘The People United will Never be Defeated’), written in May 1973 in protest against the growing right-wing movement in Chile. Political protest is also central to many of his operatic and vocal works; the writing of Pablo Neruda has proved a particular inspiration in this respect. His music incorporates atonal and other modernist techniques alongside a memorable lyricism, and draws on Chilean musical traditions, though rarely through the use of actual quotation and never merely for the sake of local colour.

Violeta Parra
(b San Carlos, Nuble, 4 October 1917; d Santiago, 5 February 1967). Chilean traditional singer, collector, cantautor (singer-songwriter), poet and artist. Parra inherited a folkloric repertory from her parents, singing with members of her family in circuses, theatres and bars in Santiago. From 1953 she dedicated her life to the subject of Chilean folklore: collecting, broadcasting on radio, recording and teaching. During the periods 1954–6 and 1961–4 she lived in France, based in Paris, performing in festivals, theatres, clubs, radio and television and recording Chilean music. In 1964 her art was exhibited at the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Decoratifs. On her return to Chile she installed a tent in a suburb of Santiago called La Reina, and here she lived and worked with Chilean popular culture, performing until her premature death by suicide.