How Can Album Notes Compete for a GRAMMY Nomination?
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The Story Behind Funky Sonatas
Funky Sonatas contains only five tracks, but the musical distance between their origins is enormous: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Astor Piazzolla, Ennio Morricone, Gato Barbieri and Lalo Schifrin.
The Album and video doesn't attempt to manufacture a convenient genre connecting them.
Instead, it asks why these composers can inhabit the same album.
Its answer appears near the beginning: the sonata can “breathe, syncopate, and groove without losing its backbone.” Classical listeners can recognize the architecture while jazz and global-music listeners encounter rhythm, improvisation, and another kind of musical freedom.
Rachmaninoff meets clave
The booklet's discussion of “Rachmaninoff en Ritmo” doesn't begin with a conventional biography of Rachmaninoff.Instead, it creates a scene.
Two grand pianos face one another “like fencers.”
Piazzolla: following María
The second track leads backward to Buenos Aires.
“Tema de María” draws inspiration from Astor Piazzolla's María de Buenos Aires, the 1968 tango operita in which tango, theater, classical music and jazz already inhabited the same unusual world.
What do you do with Morricone?
“Cinema Paradiso” creates another problem.
What can musicians possibly add to a melody that millions of listeners already know?
The booklet's answer is unusually restrained.
Don't try to improve it.
Gato Barbieri—and somebody who was there
The chapter devoted to Gato Barbieri is different again.
There is history: Argentina, jazz, Last Tango in Paris, the unmistakable tenor sound.
But then the notes reveal a human connection.
And finally, Lalo Schifrin
The final chapter may be the booklet's most personal.
Lalo Schifrin's 1966 instrumental “Bossa Antique” becomes the starting point for “Bossa Breeze,” after Sino writes lyrics to music composed six decades earlier.
