Home Productions Portrait of Tony
Saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti ‘s new record is dedicated to a jazz music legend with a restless and adventurous life: Sicilian-born clarinetist, saxophonist and pianist Tony Scott. Poking through his biography Bearzatti discovers that on June 17, 2021, the great Anthony Joseph Sciacca aka Tony Scott, would have turned 100 years old. He then decided to pay tribute to him from clarinetist to clarinetist through his own original compositions. Thus was born “Portrait of Tony,” the new Parco della Musica Records recording project, a portrait in music of one of the greatest clarinetists in jazz history.
“I had been fantasizing about Tony Scott, his incredible musical gifts and his adventurous life, for some time,” declares Francesco Bearzatti. Gifted with incredible talent and comprehensive training, having graduated from the prestigious Juilliard School in New York, Tony was also an excellent pianist, arranger and conductor. He was someone who, with his preparation and verve, could have become very famous in show business and made a lot of money. But Tony was pure, loved jazz, be bop and its priests, and was a civil rights activist. Never, ever, would he betray Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, his close friends for whom, thanks to his Sicilian origins, he spent himself with New York bosses who owned nightclubs to procure and get them gigs. Between the 1940s and 1950s, he became popular, worked with all the greats of music, and for several years, was voted by specialized critics, best jazz clarinetist of the year.”
Winner in the reeds category of Top Jazz 2011, Francesco Bearzatti has released with Parco della Musica Records two records as leader of the Tinissima 4et: “Suite for Tina Modotti” and “X (Suite for Malcolm); and one as a sideman gaining important awards in Italy and Europe. In 2011 he was awarded Best European Musician by the French Academie du jazz. Drawn irresistibly to free and shifting musical processes, Francesco Bearzatti is a versatile artist, invaluable sessionman and leader of some of the most innovative groups of recent years. From rock to jazz to electronic music, Bearzatti combines his works with a versatile and restless culture, which has come together in his latest, more cross-cutting projects, from the Bizart Trio to reinterpretations of Led Zeppelin and Sax Pistols songs, to the Tinissima Quartet.