Let’s unwind for a moment. When I haven’t been busy occupying my days with writing, my mind and body has literally been going to the beach to unwind. Somehow, I’ve lucked out and am living the coastal lifestyle (without actually living on any sea coast). While I would say it takes a change of mind and season to get certain music, I’d say, lately, it’s been so much easier to understand the pull of certain music. Case in point: Tony Esposito’s Tamburo. Soundtracking my “swim and chill” was this album which shows the draw of the Neapolitan Power Scene.
Last we left Tony, I was extolling the virtues of his transformation from Italian Pop session musician to percussion soloist more interested in the polyrhythmic music of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. On Il Grande Esploratore, Tony had experimented with his chosen instrument (the tambora) to create an electrified version of it that gave him “synth-like” tonal control over pitch and resonance. That bit of architectural shift would allow him to create epic songs like “Kalimba de Luna”, songs that sounded like Italo-Disco on a cosmic bender through Africa. Il Grande Esploratore is my idea of a fourth world classic, where the meeting of worldly influences was (once again) done with respect and reimagination, rather than mere reverence or exploitation.
Tamburo, is perfect for this season, for another reason. It was his “purest” distillation of an earlier influence, that of the spiritual kind. You’d be hard pressed to realize this, but in the ‘70s Tony made a whole slew of albums driven by the spirit of Pharaoh Sanders, John Coltrane, and other spiritual jazz musicians. Gorgeous albums, La Banda Del Sole (especially), sounded like Balearic placeholders for spiritual jazz artists to traffic under. However, as good as those albums were, they were missing Tony as the focus in his music. Tamburo flipped the script. Completely indebted to the grooves of African and Italian folk music, Tamburo recast Tony as an accessible liaison between the worlds of Fela Kuti and that Neapolitan sound that fellow Italian Pino Daniele was seeking to build from the ground up.
Far more jubilant and succinct than before, Tamburo appears to have deeply absorbed the long-form percussive workouts of the past and tried to distill the best bits into songs. It was funkier. It was less “heady”, any album with a “Limbo Rock” cover must be, but that worked to its benefit. Up front was the unlikely mix of drum machines and acoustic percussion, allowing Tamburo to absolve itself of a dated sound. On songs like “Controra” you can imagine the influence of the Talking Heads rearing, on “Je-Na” the Afro-Brazilian sounds of Jorge Ben Jor and on others like “Il Giorno E La Notte” we hear Tony taking influence from the imaginary world music from the likes of Lucio Battisti.
What “Pagaia” and “Danza Dell’Acqua”, arguably the albums most impressive tracks, show is that Tony had an eye for songcraft hidden beneath all the gargantuan grooves. The former reimagines vaudevillian show music as a larger than life Afro-Pop dance scene. “Pata Pata”’s surprisingly laid-back, Afro-Caribbean calypso then serves as a brilliant segue to the incredible “Danza Dell’Acqua”.
Serving up all the hallmarks of what would make that whole scene special, from the intricate percussion arrangement to the light Prog touches, “Danza Dell’Acqua” works because it luxuriates in that coastal music that only Italy could create, at this moment. “Danza Dell’Acqua” was a purposely hypnotic Pop song that could fit alongside its disco brethren, elsewhere, here, though it fits the larger soundtrack to anything luminous, striving for relaxation. You’ll love Tamburo at home, but seriously, the place where Tamburo opens up to you the most is right outside your door, exactly where it belongs. With every call must come a response.