Parco della Musica Records presents “Storytellers,” the debut work of young saxophonist and composer Simone Alessandrini. The album consists of seven original and highly evocative tracks that create a complex jazz architecture; a distinctly inspired album in which individual tracks are pieces of a larger narrative mosaic. Born in 1983, who grew up listening to Zappa, progressive rock and Coleman‘s jazz, on his recording debut Simone Alessandrini proves to be an outstanding storyteller in a sharp and visionary album, evoking between myth and legend and popular characters against the backdrop of World War II. “I grew up musically with a passion for concept albums,” the author declares, “and I would like this to be the first in a long series, dealing with different themes from time to time.

In “Storytellers,” music is the pretext for bringing to life characters with whom the jazz musician came into contact in a completely accidental way: through almost legendary tales passed down in San Felice Circeo, where Alessandrini grew up, and Rome, where he was born. “I did not think,” Simone Alessandrini continued, “of making a soundtrack to the stories I was going to tell, but rather the opposite, trying to ‘dress up’ the lived experience with my own way of understanding music.” With their names worthy of a screenwriter’s imagination but the product of popular inventiveness, Sor Vince’, Mr. Adriano and Cetto La Mitraglia become some of the protagonists of the tracks of “Storytellers.”

So do Olga and Nazario, two lovers capable of finding each other again after years apart; Il gobbo del Quarticciolo, with its heroic acts of sabotage against the Germans on the Via Casilina; and the characters in L’imbroglio del cordoglio, a paradoxical tale of a wake staged to conceal the theft of a pig. Alessandrini ‘s music thus gives three-dimensionality to ordinary but, in their own way, extraordinary characters who faced the war and came out with their heads held high, with courage and dignity.