20TH CENTURY FOXTROTS • 6

SOUTHERN EUROPE

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GOTTLIEB WALLISCH

‘The quest for relevant pieces to form a Southern European Foxtrot-album was a wonderful challenge! Including Italy, which offers the widest variety of styles and directions within early Jazz-influenced music, I am happy to present piano music from no less than 6 different countries. Well-known names like Mompou (with his early Foxtrot and Tango) and Casella stand out but then there are also composers with a truly mediterranean spirit from Malta, Cyprus or Greece.

I found particular pleasure in Skalkottas’ substantial Shimmy Tempo, written in Berlin in 1924, which feels like an adequate musical description of the German capital’s craziness and bombast at that time. Introducing the “new” dances to kids was seemingly important to several composers from the South – the sets of children’s pieces offered by Bianchini or de Lima get to the core of the new rhythms on smallest scale.   

Here is Volume 6 of “20th Century Foxtrots” – a soulful and sunny album!’

– Gottlieb Wallisch