We all have a blues to cry. It is a beautiful title and a slightly misleading one, because there is almost no blues on this record. What there is instead is five of the best musicians in Italy — serious jazz players, not rock musicians who fancied a bit of improvising — signed to RCA and pointed at an audience of long-haired teenagers who had come for Genesis. It should have been a disaster. It became one of the two or three records that made Italian jazz-rock a real thing rather than an import.

The short version

Their second album, released in 1973 on RCA Italiana in a fold-out sleeve, seven tracks, and the follow-up to Azimut of the year before. Giovanni Tommaso plays bass, wrote most of it, and sings on exactly one track; Franco D’Andrea plays acoustic and electric piano; Claudio Fasoli plays alto and soprano saxophone; Tony Sidney plays electric guitar; Bruno Biriaco plays drums and percussion. That is the entire band and it never changed during the classic run. Almost everything here is instrumental, and the one piece with a vocal opens the record.

Jazz players in a rock world

Perigeo were not a progressive rock band and never claimed to be. Tommaso was already a serious jazz bassist; D’Andrea was on his way to becoming one of the most important pianists Italy has produced; Fasoli was a jazz musician of standing. What made them different from every other jazz group in the country was that they took a rock rhythm section seriously, plugged in, and let a guitarist — Sidney, an American who had washed up in Rome — play like a rock guitarist rather than a well-behaved accompanist. On the debut he was barely there. Here he is one of the leads, and the difference is most of what separates the two albums. RCA marketed them alongside the prog bands, and the prog audience turned up, which is why they belong in this story at all.

The sound

Fusion with the corners left rough, and considerably stranger than the label suggests. D’Andrea moves between acoustic piano and Rhodes and does the harmonic work; Fasoli’s saxophone carries the melodies and it is the most emotional voice on the record; Sidney wails across the top with a tone that owes as much to English progressive rock as to jazz; Tommaso and Biriaco push. There are psychedelic elements woven through the arrangements that no American fusion band of the period would have gone near, and the whole thing has a fragile, unhurried beauty that Italian listeners tend to describe as Mediterranean and everyone else struggles to name. It is not difficult listening, exactly, but it asks something of you. Nothing on it is showing off.

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The songs

Non c’e tempo da perdere opens at nearly nine minutes with Tommaso’s bowed bass and his voice, and if you know Azimut you will hear the family resemblance immediately. Deja vu is four minutes of haunted piano working the edge of dissonance, with wordless singing and Fasoli over the top. Rituale is the long one on side one, starting on small percussion and handing itself to Sidney, who does not give it back. The title track opens side two and is six relaxed, gracious minutes. Country is short and meditative. Nadir is D’Andrea’s own composition and the piece most closely tied to the debut. Vento, pioggia e sole closes at nine and a half and is the argument for the whole album — volcanic, modern, and the best possible ending.

Reception and legacy

It sold, it toured, and it holds up: many Italians name this as the Perigeo album, ahead of the debut and ahead of everything that followed. The band kept going through the mid-seventies, played Montreux, and eventually dissolved into other careers — D’Andrea into a long and serious jazz life, Fasoli likewise, Tommaso into everything. A later version of the group carried the name into the eighties with different players. The lasting point is bigger than the record: before Perigeo, Italian jazz and Italian rock did not talk to each other. Afterwards they did, and you can hear the consequences in Napoli Centrale, in Area, in Goblin, and in half the session players who made the decade work.

The verdict

Essential, with a caveat: this is not RPI and you should not come to it wanting RPI. Come to it as the best Italian jazz-rock album of its year and it is unimpeachable. Play Vento, pioggia e sole first — if the last nine minutes work on you, go back and take the record from the top. Then Azimut for the quieter version of the same band, Area’s Arbeit Macht Frei for the political and far more violent end of the same impulse, and Napoli Centrale for the southern one. Seven tracks, one blues, and not a wasted bar anywhere.

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