Mare Nostrum III – Delightful

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren

Three outstanding musicians. I had the pleasure of seeing two of them live. French accordionist Richard Galliano back in the 1990s, in a fantastic concert with Michel Portal on the clarinet, and Italian trumpet magician Paolo Fresu nearly two decades later in another beautiful duet, with Ralph Towner. The only one I haven’t seen yet is Jan Lundgren, Swedish pianist, but I do own several of his albums.

So you get the picture, a really weird combination of instruments. Does it work out? Very well so. This is not at all French musette style (the light French popular music) that you often hear Galliano play, this is something entirely different.

Mare Nostrum III – Paolo Fresu – Richard Galliano – Jan Lundgren – ACT 2019

So what do you get? Well, the style of music is hard to describe actually. This is mainly very slow, pensive music making you wish you’d sit on a terrace let’s say on the Amalfi cost, after tourist season late September, with a light breeze, and maybe a glass of limoncello.

Are you any smarter now? Probably not, but if you like my little analogy above, you’ll like the album. Fresu really is the star here on this album, his subtle trumpet tones pretty much carry the entire album, though the trio doesn’t have a leader, and plays as if they’ve played together forever. Well, that’s not so suprising, they actually have. The first album of this series (the III indicates the volume number), was already released in 2008. Volume II is much more recent, in 2016, and was already reviewed on my blog here.

Overall, if you like this rather contrasted choice of instruments, or if you simply like beautiful music, you should check this out.

My rating: 4 stars

You can find it here (Qobuz)

(Note that Qobuz is now available in the US as well, so I won’t give alternative download sources any more. If you’re in a non Qobuz country, Prostudiomasters typically is a good source).

FYI, at the time of writing Qobuz has a 20% discount on the volume II of this album.