Mauro Campobasso & Mauro Manzoni - Vanishing Point - Music, Life and Friendship on a Motorcycle Trip Through Europe (2022)

A day like any other, in April 2018, in a bar, outdoors, sitting at a table, with our motorcycles parked in front of us, I jokingly said to Mauro Manzoni: "But it wouldn't be nice to take a trip to Europe on a motorbike to Oslo and record a record when we arrive? " Mauro replied: “We would need bigger motorcycles and then Oslo is too far, let's go to Berlin”. In the end we did it, and it was crazy. Vanishing Point is the ideal sequel to our first album together, 2004 Point Zero: a timeless journey that once again pays homage to Richard C. Sarafian's 1971 film.

Vanishing Point is the new album by Mauro Manzoni and Mauro Campobasso that comes out 10 years after the first album made for Parco della Musica Records, “Eyes Wide Shut” dedicated to Stanley Kubrick.

This time the music takes inspiration from a motorcycle trip across Europe aboard their BMWs in August 2019. The destination: Berlin. The idea was that of a path that drew inspiration from places, stops, from interior reflections, from human confrontations and from the direct, naturalistic and physical impact that only motorcycling can always offer. The two musicians left for Germany both with their own instruments and a series of well-defined and organized pieces and others not too elaborate: compositions that in some cases represented a real plot to be developed in the recording studio in Berlin. In other cases, some compositions were directly inspired by the places visited. This is where the idea of ​​associating a stage of the journey with each composition of the record was born. In Berlin, the meeting with friends Gaia Mattiuzzi, singer, and Walter Paoli, drummer, to create the album together.

But as often happens in these cases, time was not enough: upon returning home, the need arose to better define the work, deepening it and adding ideas born during the return trip in a sort of ideal axis that linked Berlin with Bologna, city of residence of the two musicians. During these reflections, in full editing and editing phase and with the additional participation of other precious musician friends (the double bass of Stefano Senni, the voices of Arianna Cleri, Federica Orlandini and Claudia Pantalone and Andrea Giovannitti who overdubbed several trumpets in section ), the pandemic broke out which brought the project to a violent halt.

Only with the easing of the restrictions on encounters and socializing, the two musicians, assisted by Walter Paoli as co-producer, were able to calmly finish the disc.

Focused on the music of Campobasso & Manzoni, but with a vision of the arrangement shared by three with Walter Paoli, the disc ranges from song form, declined through the aid of the suite, to purely instrumental compositions.

The style and what Campobasso & Manzoni have deepened and curated over the many years of collaboration together: a current and modern jazz vision, which at the same time feeds on different styles and cultures, from song and progressive rock to contemporary music and concrete, with a great passion for sound, made explicit through the use of digital and analogue electronics, all mixed with acoustic instruments.

The original lyrics of the disc were specially written for the disc by the singers and composers Costanza Alegiani and Marta Raviglia.

Mauro Manzoni, saxophonist and composer, began playing as early as the eighties showing a ductility that allows him to pass with ease from more strictly jazz fields to borderline situations where classical, ethnic and contemporary influences intersect. He records about twenty works with labels such as Splasc (H), Le Parc, Cmc, BMG, DDQ, Soul Note, Dodicilune and plays in many festivals in Italy and abroad. He collaborates with musicians such as Paolo Fresu, Gianluigi Trovesi, Javier Girotto, Kenny Wheeler, Pierre Favre, Fabrizio Bosso, Tino Tracanna, Luca Bulgarelli, Marco Tamburini, Antonello Salis, Achille Succi, Salvatore Zanchini, Daniele Di Bonaventura, Cristina Zavalloni. He has worked both for projects by writers such as Carlo Lucarelli, Simona Vinci, Gianpiero Rigosi, and in theatrical projects with Giuseppe Cederna and in the soundtracks of many films of the silent period.

Mauro Campobasso, guitarist, composer and arranger, born in Taranto, lives in Bologna. He graduated in musicology at the Dams in Bologna and in Jazz Guitar at the Biennium of the Conservatory of Rovigo. Att