Piccola Bottega Baltazar
Piccola Bottega Baltazar
Piccola Bottega Baltazar are a band from Veneto that are a pleasure to listen to, with a sense of suave musicality, hints of tango, chanson and jazz, and lyrics that are idiosyncratic, playful, and at times incisive. For their first album the band offer an homage to Fabrizio de Andr� by covering some of his songs as well as some of their own compositions in his honor. Their songs and their cover versions melt together seamlessly and the result is low-key but engaging.
The process of covering a song can be fascinating. What is it that drives someone to subject his own creativity to someone else's primary idea? Is it a lack of originality? A love for someone else's oeuvre so close to their own ideal? The challenge of working within constraints that strangely leave you freer to persue your own originality? A form of flattery? It may be any and all of those reasons but I believe Piccola Bottega Baltazar achieve a result that retains a lot of the structure and power of de Andr�'s work and yet retains their own unique sound.
The lyrics are full of stories and it's a pity that translations are not included for the international audience this music deserves. The tales they recount are surreal, sweet, urbane or pastoral depending on the setting, such as the award-winning "Pic-nic al cavalcavia," (which won them an award in a Monferrautore competition for best lyrics about human-environmental interaction). Before you know it, about forty minutes have effortlessly passed, the peaceful feeling occasionally disrupted by a dark lyric, or the slightly unsettling photographs in the booklet... someone's daughters dressing up or something more sinister?
Piccola Bottega Baltazar have created a record that works perfectly. It is a jazz-tinted, cigar-smoked, smart, winking work, a record that I revisit with pleasure every once in a while when I feel the need for life's little pleasures (or cruelties) filtered through somebody's Philosophy degree but also human sensitivity. - Nondas Kitsos
CDs available from cdRoots
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