Self-released
Release date: March 2019
Production: Robert Rojc
Album length: 50.33 min
Genre: Gypsy Swing
Teo Collori, a former member of Eskobars and part of Magnifico’s backing band, is back after nearly four years with his Momento Cigano, offering a new release called »Kamerato muzikante«. Across eleven tracks and a good fifty minutes of music, it picks up where the debut »Hot Club Piran« (2015) left off, keeping its devotion to the treasures of gypsy swing, as the opener Mimi makes clear right away. But on the new album the band widens its arrangements and reaches for fresh horizons in how it arranges. That means a deeper, more absorbed dive into the core of the improvisational structures and inserts, and at the same time the band has pulled off, on the composing side, an album that delivers, keeps and nurtures an incredible listenability and flow.
The new song Srečo could (immodestly speaking) have become a world classic of gypsy swing, had it been recorded 70-odd years ago, and it’s a track that can safely spin at any time on any radio frequency. »Kamerato Muzikante« as a whole carries a special charm too, a perfect feeling of nostalgia and longing for times long past, even though that wasn’t really the musicians’ intention, but they simply nailed that moment, phenomenally, and poured it into this release.
»Kamerato Muzikante« deepens and expands a dialogue of great mutual harmony and compatibility between the building blocks of sound. The key moment that actually made this possible for the band on the new album was a shake-up of the lineup, when the superb bassist Jan Gregorka (Terra Mystica, Sekou Kouyate Experience, Janez Bončina Benč) and guitarist Metod Banko joined the ranks. Banko is also a highly sought-after vocalist and Collori’s longtime colleague from their joint album »Pesmi morja in sonca«. In an incredible unity of deep listening and “understanding”, the musicians constantly open up space for each other for a flood of improvised inserts, which are definitely well thought out, or tightly controlled, because the album comes across as a whole as remarkably coordinated and balanced. No single building block of the sonic picture dominates, and everything sits in balance, with the right shades of constant flowing, colorful contrasts across the soundscape, courtesy of the ever-playful clarinet, acoustic guitar and/or violin.
The band swaps through a lovely run of different rhythmic keys, which give the basic framework for the development of the songs themselves, adding extra dynamism to the arrangements, while the album as a whole has a wide reach of dynamic development in everything it offers, teasing, speaking to and communing infectiously with the listener the whole way through.
There’s no shortage of playfulness and fire on this album. Teo Collori and Momento Cigano occupy a very special niche in the Slovenian music scene, since despite their instrumental nature, they always come across as exceptionally close, inviting and approachable. They also stir up a feeling of nostalgia, from when music wasn’t yet played on electricity, when people sat back calmly and easily in cafés to the live cabaret accompaniment of the first early bands that melded jazz and folk. That kind of charm is offered in Slovenia today, among others, by Vasko Atanasovski with his works, plus Počeni škafi, Vesna Zornik’s TangoApassionada, Klarisa Jovanovič, definitely Manouche, and Boštjan Gombač’s solo shenanigans, to name just a few that jump to mind right away.
With polka-waltzes like Bled 1960, Teo Collori and Momento Cigano will always easily rope in a good chunk of the crowd, who’ll take them as their own in an instant. Even if that chunk of the audience just happens to wander into one of their gigs by pure accident. Bled 1960 carries quite a bit of traditional folk sound carried over from the Alpine expanses and delivers an incredibly charming detour on the album. The very next track, Azil, is once again devoutly smitten with gypsy jazz swing and so flips the atmosphere completely on its head, as the band rushes in it toward other spheres of its joyful comedy. Collori must be a fan of Al Di Meola and one or another of his albums like »Elegant Gypsy« or »Hotel Casino«, which the superb closing track Warrior’s Lullaby lays bare in a nutshell, being generously paved with the vivid rhetoric of guitar inserts.
One of the album’s peaks is surely the more than ten-minute musical “snake” Tango, a story all its own full of improvisational indulgence and further proof that this time Momento Cigano , despite a hugely considered stance of classical composition-building, where motivic tangibility is clearly present and dominant throughout, have just let more room loose for the cheeky flood of improvised inserts. Tango is, regardless of its length, actually the moment on the album that most directly shows the band’s extraordinary chemistry and a lovely internalized sense of keeping balance, total unpretentiousness and great mutual harmony between the building blocks of the sonic picture, where all the instruments are clearly contrasted and expressed, yet none of them overpowers another.
»Kamerato Muzikante« is by no means short on dynamite, and the album speaks to the listener constantly playfully and at the same time with undisguised passion and intensity of Mediterranean cheekiness and ease. It’s a hugely laid-back album, yet surprisingly heartfelt, passionate and played with full-blooded fire. In the aesthetic sense of composing too, Teo Collori with »Kamerato Muzikante« haven’t just matched but surpassed their wildly bold and fun predecessor, the one they stepped onto the scene with just a touch reserved and cautious. With the new album the crew has dug in more firmly and fitted into the Slovenian music-amusement park as a solid, strong and above all credibly confident musical story, one worth keeping an eye on from here on out.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.5 / 10
Tracklist:
1. Mimi
2. Istriano duro
3. Srečo
4. La pluie
5. Die Hitze der Sommernacht
6. Negotova
7. Senza risposta
8. Bled 1960
9. Azil
10. Tango
11. Warrior’s Lullaby
Lineup:
Teo Collori – guitar, solo guitar
Metod Banko – guitar
Matija Krečič – violin
Matej Kužel – clarinet
Jan Gregorka – bass
