After the double album by the octet led by Franco D’Andrea, Parco della Musica Records releases a solo album by the Merano pianist. A long-awaited return that holds many surprises. The solo is the moment of maximum introspection for a musician: it is the confrontation with the instrument, with its limitations, with strategies to overcome them, but above all it is the confrontation with oneself. In 1980 Franco D’Andrea recorded two solo piano albums, “Dialogues With Super Ego” and “Es,” which marked the beginning of a new creative phase that lasts uninterrupted to this day. The research on material, sound, and combination of elements, which had already begun in previous years, is joined by an entirely new fact: an unprecedented inner exploration.

To listen to those two records is to put oneself to the ears of a long stream of consciousness that flows uninterrupted and swirling. Over the years, exploration of the inner world and research and experimentation on musical parameters have come to coincide: the piano has become populated with colors and rhythms, has taken on an orchestral dimension, and has recovered performance practices from early jazz as well as from the free period; the inwardness of the piano solo has flowed into the music of the extended ensembles, which breathe as one organism, while the heterophony of the latter has been absorbed by the solo. Listening to Franco D’Andrea ‘s solo piano today is no longer just listening to that inner dimension, that solitary stream-of-consciousness of the first important solo records. Franco is no longer alone. His solo music is magically collective. It evokes a constant dialogue between the sound worlds that inhabit the artist’s depths: individual consciousness mingles with collective consciousness.

With more than 160 records recorded in Italy and abroad and 20 Top Jazz awards won in his career, including 11 in the “Italian Musician of the Year” category, Franco D’Andrea is considered one of the best contemporary pianists and represents the excellence that Italian jazz has been able to produce over the past 50 years. His uniqueness is evidenced by more than two hundred pieces composed, authoritative academic awards, hundreds of collaborations with musicians from all over the world, and master classes given in various schools and academies. Franco D’Andrea has traced with his records, his concerts and his teaching activity an entirely personal path in jazz, pursuing deep research in the field of Afro-American music, giving birth to ambitious projects ranging from solo to large ensembles, always maintaining an extremely original aesthetic and poetic figure.