Author: Peter Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Trieste / Piazza Verdi / Italy
Concert date: 08.08.2014
Attendance: 600
Ticket price: €0.00 (free entry!)
Trieste’s summer festival serves up one or more interesting gigs almost every year, worth the attention of music lovers (especially prog rock fans) from the land under the ‘shady side’ of the Alps. This time, seasoned keyboard master Alex Carpani and his band landed near the main square. They put out a new studio album this year called »4 Destinies« (2014). Alex and his crew, whose Italian contingent includes singer Joe Sal, guitarist Ettore Salati (formerly of the Italian symphonic prog outfit The Watch), bassist GB Giorgi and drummer Alessandro Di Caprio, mostly swear by symphonic prog rock the way it was played in the seventies, with the ‘traditional’ keyboard arsenal (piano, Hammond organ, Mellotron, Moog) and a strong influence from the Italian greats of the genre.
Half as many people would probably have crammed in for this show if Alex’s band hadn’t brought along a special guest, the legendary woodwind player David Jackson (ex-Van Der Graaf Generator), who played on the current album »4 Destinies« with great success, even though he’s probably unlikely to join them for the long haul. Still incredibly charismatic, witty and lucid despite his enviable number of years, Jackson is a one-of-a-kind stage presence, as all fans of Van Der Graaf Generator (VDGG for short) have known for ages. Crowned with his trusty sailor-Scottish cap, he’s one of the few musicians who can play tenor and alto sax at the same time. Besides his fascinating tenor and alto sax skills, Jackson showed off a whole bunch of other wind instruments that night, including soprano sax, flute, recorder, shepherd’s pipe and a fife, and he also proved himself an excellent whistler and stage entertainer. With his ‘spacey’ gestures and witty one-liners, he egged on the whole band mid-song and set the tempo, which means the songs were surely played even more passionately and wholeheartedly under David’s prodding than they otherwise would have been.
Mr. Jackson and Mr. Carpani were undoubtedly the night’s main ‘attractions’, though the rest of Alex’s backing band are by no means slouches. The show opened with the famous, gloomy improvisation that was nothing more than the intro to the VDGG classic »Darkness (11/11)«, which surely sent shivers down the spines of some of the longtime followers of this unforgettable English prog rock band. The band’s chemistry was top-notch throughout the entire evening, and apart from some oscillation problems on the keyboards, which a few times briefly produced nasty scratching and buzzing that nearly wrecked the whole sound, there were no major or lengthy hiccups.
Maestro Carpani is an outstanding keyboard virtuoso who has clearly learned a lot from Keith Emerson (Emerson, Lake & Palmer, ex-The Nice) and Tony Pagliuca (ex-Le Orme), and with original seventies keyboards he managed to conjure up an authentic sound from that era. Salati’s electric guitar, which blended beautifully with Jackson’s sax passages, filled out the sonic collage nicely even on those VDGG classics where there originally were no guitar parts, while Giorgi’s bass successfully stood in for Hugh Banton’s bass pedals from the original versions. Drummer Di Caprio was the only one who had some trouble ‘replacing’ Guy Evans, which was most noticeable during the VDGG evergreen »Man-Erg«, where he put too little fire and ferocity into his drumming. Singer Joe Sal, meanwhile, was a particular delight from the very first song, even though he had the incredibly heavy burden of filling in for the vocals of the legendary Peter Hammill.
Sal proved himself not only a worthy stand-in for Hammill, especially in the more ‘laid-back’ sections of the VDGG numbers, but showed that with his versatile vocal abilities he could land work with plenty of acts from totally different genres. Jackson was of course a chapter all his own, completely dissolving into the ‘heat of the night’ and unable to tear himself away from his colorful array of wind instruments, and Carpani’s claim that he’s the ‘Hendrix of the saxophone’ didn’t sound the least bit exaggerated. One of the funniest moments of the evening was a short joke from Jackson. With the words ‘this one controls everything’, he picked up the shepherd’s pipe and ‘hypnotized’ part of the crowd so thoroughly that they started bleating like a flock of obedient sheep, and everybody had a blast.
Alex Carpani and his buddies played their new album in full, meaning all four tracks from »4 Destinies«, which, by the way, is a very good record. The peak of the show came with the performance of the original piece »The Infinite Room«. Among the VDGG classics, the regular set also featured the phantasmagorical »My Room (Waiting For Wonderland)«, the much-anticipated »Killer« (thanks to Jackson’s sax explosions), the big surprise »Boleas Panic« and the indispensable evergreen »Man-Erg«. They closed the main set with that last one. The most interesting thing about Alex and his company is that the lyrics on Carpani’s original songs mix English and Italian, and the sound of individual pieces also swings between a British and an Italian take on prog.
No wonder they caught Jackson’s attention, though it’s kind of funny that in his old age he’d rather play with them than with VDGG, with whom he parted ways on not exactly friendly terms years ago. His enthusiastic remark that it was his ‘first time in Trieste’ wouldn’t even have been necessary if he’d made peace with the VDGG trio back in 2009 and played with them on Trieste’s central square back then. The only criticism of this fantastic evening goes to the encore. The problem wasn’t that it wouldn’t be nice to hear the cult instrumental »Theme One«, the only cover in the VDGG story, but the fact that they needlessly stretched a roughly three-minute track out to a full 25 minutes. Instead of an overly drawn-out farewell, they could easily have played three more VDGG covers or Carpani’s original songs from his first two studio albums. Luckily, Jackson, in phenomenal spirits, and singer Sal, who took a short stroll through the crowd during his vocal improvising, kept us entertained all the way to the end.
The show by Alex Carpani, David Jackson and their up-and-coming sidekicks was a must-see for every fan of the Italian symphonic prog rock scene and the unforgettable Van Der Graaf Generator legacy. They really squeezed out every last drop that night, and considering the concert was completely free, with a few visually, age-wise and sociologically fairly unexpected faces popping up in the crowd here and there, it would be totally pointless to complain too much about the drawn-out »Theme One« finale, whose main motif kept echoing in our ears long after Alex’s band said goodbye.
Setlist
1. Darkness (11/11)
2. My Room (Waiting For Wonderland)
3. The Silk Road
4. Killer
5. Sky And Sea
6. Boleas Panic
7. The Infinite Room
8. Man-Erg
9. Time Spiral
—encore—
10. Theme One
Photo gallery
