Home Productions Mania Hotel
“Mania Hotel,” the new project of jazz saxophonist Simone Alessandrini and his Storytellers, is a concept album entirely dedicated to the theme of madness that tells five real-life stories in music, some already known and others he has personally experienced. On the album, released by Parco della Musica Records, the story of Marina Luz, the little girl abandoned in the jungle and raised by monkeys, Dr. Semmelweis “the savior of mothers,” Attilio’s lament of love, the affair of the “libertine, unnatural, irose” locked up in asylums during the Fascist 20-year period, and the day of ordinary madness in a bar, in which savagery is hurled at an invisible enemy.
Stories that happened in different eras but have in common the fragility of human identity and the possibility of it being erased by society. “Mania Hotel” is an undefined place, a container of five rooms housing unexpressed identities. But there is a presence that passes through them, that speaks to them and can decide their stay there.This presence is none other than time itself. The time that establishes the fine line between normality and insanity. Time acting as judge and healer. While in the first album (“Storytellers,” 2017), between myth and history, he had evoked some common yet legendary characters against the backdrop of World War II, in this second work Simone Alessandrini becomes first an observer, then a storyteller, and finally an heir to a humanity that has been searching all its life for its freedom.
Musically a lot happens. Over a carpet of jazz music they open up scenarios that tend toward rock but at the same time the influence of early 20th century cultured music is evident. There is the echo of folk fanfare but also the influence of Tom Waits. The writing of the songs is very rigorous although several times it breaks free to moments of total improvisation. “Mania Hotel” is a sonic vessel whose dynamic sound manages to oscillate between the acoustic and electric worlds, where the three frontline horns bring New Orleans to Europe, alternating acidic moments with a melancholic and evocative sound.