Francesca Bertazzo Hart, George Cables, Beppe Pilotto, Steve Williams - The Teaneck Session (2015)

Three years after «The Grace of Gryce» (Caligola 2160), the album that marked the achievement of her full artistic maturity, Francesca Bertazzo Hart, vocalist with a sense of swing, natural musicality and an unusual interpretative sensibility, with this «The Teaneck session» dispels any doubt one could have. The Venetian singer leaves her guitar at home when, together with her partner in life and in music Beppe Pilotto, she decides to fly to New York, because there a master like George Cables, whose piano is more than enough to accompany her, is waiting for her. A singer couldn’t really wish for something more than this. You can immediately tell it by the soft and catching rhythmic pace of That old black magic, but even more, perhaps because it is less expected, by the sublime tone combining softness and depth, with which she deals with the four ballads in the album. The choice fell on Reflections, Day dream, My old flame and I remember Clifford, sacred jazz pieces, therefore full of dangers, but whose interpretations instead devotes Francesca, purebred musician, able to bend her renowned vocal virtuosity with patient study and continuous research, to musical architectures on a more ambitious scale. Such a high level, however, could not be achieved without the support of a solid and precise rhythmic couple as that formed by Beppe Pilotto’s pulsating bass and Steve Williams’ insistent drums, at ease both in the Dameron’s Lazy bird and If you could see me now, the latter with a bossa rhythm, and in the swirling cascade of notes of the Dizzy Gillespie’s Bebop.