Search - Dominique Di Piazza :: Princess Sita

Imagine a musician blessed with the artistic DNA of Django Reinhardt and Jaco Pastorius, fluent in every idiom from flamenco, gospel, and the sub-continental syncopations of India, to avant jazz-fusion. Now, with the release of French bassist Dominique Di Piazza s long-awaited debut as a leader, Princess Sita, you won t have to imagine any more. Di Piazza brings his astonishing gifts to the fore, in this stunning and spectacular recording, featuring an impressive trio consisting of Nelson Veras on guitar and drummer Manhu Roche.

According to Chris Jisi in Bass Player magazine, Di Piazza plays his 5-string (tuned EADGC) either with his bare fingers or with a fingerpick on his index or middle finger, and a custom thumb pick with a special leather edge ... [his] signature chord style is marked by dizzying runs, arpeggios, and hammered trills strung between angular voicing, as well as the occasional comp via thumb-plucked bass notes and finger-swept triads. Di Piazza s iconoclastic technique is on full display on the CD s twelve tracks. Buoyed by Roche s lithe drumming and Veras s guitar licks, the leader s complete command of his instrument becomes crystal clear on the fanfare-type opener Nuages, and on brisk 4/4 selections like Nemo, with Di Piazza s opening motif reminiscent of Pastorius s Okonole y Trompa, the Django-bop number Dinello, which melodically calls to mind Thelonious Monk s Well You Needn t and Sonny Rollins s Airegin, and the hyper-powered, neo-fusion offering Wake Up. Little Rose conjures the grand designs of the Moors, contrasted by the Indo-tantric tempo of the title track, and the trio s brilliant take on Joe Henderson s Blue Note classic Recorda Me.

Di Piazza s conceptions spring from his complex cultural background: He was born in 1959 in Lyon, France to Sicilian parents, and raised by a Gypsy stepfather. I always listened to Gypsy and flamenco music and eastern musics, such as Indian and oriental music, he told AllAboutJazz.com, I originally started to play guitar in 1975 with African musicians from Cameroon, in Lyon, and played a little bass with a pick. I picked up a little bit of the African sixteenth note style, and can say that this is why I really enjoyed what I heard Jaco doing later with sixteenths. It was that thing that captured me first in the Jaco style. At 19, I heard Jaco and sold my guitar and decided to work harder on the bass. Before I knew Jaco s stuff I could play loads of bebop phrases on guitar. I had a big II-V-I vocabulary, working on Django, Wes and George Benson lines.