(Hard Bop, Post-Bop, Vocal Jazz) Ada Montellanico & Enrico Pieranunzi - Danza di una ninfa - 2005, APE (image+.cue), lossless

Who knows what music Luigi would have chosen for these unpublished pieces of his. The sincere passion and love that we sense when listening to the voice of Ada, who sang them for him, and the music she composed for him along with Enrico Pieranunzi, have surely brought some very precious memories back to life. (Patrizia and Giuseppe Tenco)
I have always been convinced that one of art's most basic requisites, even before aesthetic outcome (i.e. formal, perceptible beauty), was emotional output, that immediately palpable communication between author and reader, listener or viewer. If that emotion then undergoes the enhancement of interpretation to the point that it leaves a lasting and indelible mark, well, the result is simply the kind of miraculous magic that only art is capable of. That's what takes place in this new extraordinary event, whose protagonist is an artist in the absolute sense of the term. Luigi Tenco is ever present with his poetry (yes, poetry: poetry of music and words, and of voice, since poetry is creation itself), and represented by Ada Montellanico, with the support of exceptionally sensitive musicians like Enrico Pieranumi, in well-known selections such as Mi sono innamorato di te, Ho capito che ti amo, Quasi sera, In qualche parte del mondo, II tempo passo, and others, performed here with such delicacy as to raise gooseflesh on the most seasoned listeners of jazz as well as those most distant from that world (to which Tenco devoted his earliest studies, making of them both myth and cult).
But the true novelty, the "new Tenco" of this event - already lofty in and of itself- consists of four previously unpublished texts set to a music that remains perfectly faithful to the message, to the poetics, let's say for which Tenco is famous: that of the myth and dream of love, as in Danza di una ninfa sotto la luna; or of the crude reality of feelings, and p,recisely for this reason vainly seeking eternal gentleness, as in Mia cara arnica; or else a Tenco holed up in the uncertainty and torment of his quest for self, asm Da quando; and finally, a Tenco who seems, yes, to play with feelings, with the other subject of love, but who, in reality, finds in the even verbal reaction of the game the harsh truth of feelings, as in the fourth unpublished piece, O me.
These four extraordinary unpublished pieces, written by Tenco but never before set to music, are performed here for the first time ever by Ada Montellanico and Enrico Pieranumi, who have each composed the music for two of the pieces. Montellanico performs all the selections on the CD, those previously published and not, and is also composer, along with Pieranumi on the unpublished ones. But it should be pointed out once and for all that, fully within the spirit of one of these texts, she truly becomes his nymph, skilfully tempting us beyond reality and even dream to offer, as Tenco writes in his song, "an illusion of happiness" - which is, in any case, more sincere that an apparent and false happiness - leaving us with one of an eternity of question marks etched in the sand. (Mario Dentone)