Gianluigi Trovesi & Gianni Coscia

“Does humor belong in music?” It’s been three decades now since Frank Zappa posed his rhetorical question, and few have offered an answer as persuasive as the work of the accordionist Gianni Coscia and the clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi. Their roots are everywhere and nowhere: In “Cerca di Cibo” [In search of sustenance], a release whose originality sparked a good deal of discussion, combines the Italian tradition with the cinematic melodies of "Il Postino", the music of the Modern Jazz Quartet, the soundtrack from an old TV version of “Pinocchio” and other material from who know where.

Their reading of “Mahoganny” on “Round about Weill” was equally inspired. Having posed another rhetorical question, this time centered on the existence of two Kurt Weills—“Was the scholarly German musician a different entity from the popular Broadway song-writer?”—the duo go on to answer it with a resounding “No, of course not!”. For in Weill they saw a social / musical / philosophical fellow traveler, a musician who shared their distaste for the pretensions of a self-declared “high art” which intolerantly insinuates that anything diverging from its aesthetic is somehow ‘low’.

Coscia and Trovesi can be humorous, precisely because they take their work and role so seriously. They poke fun at themselves in their improvisations, turn to the crowd and urge them to “Start clapping, please... this piece is endless!”.

Trovesi is one of the monstres sacrés of the European jazz scene and a woodwind master who has played with a host of stellar jazzmen. Seeing and hearing Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy up close proved to be a turning point in his life and his music, while the history of his octet encapsulates that of Italian jazz.

Coscia worked as a lawyer for many years before devoting himself to the accordion. He expresses himself through an exploration of the ‘fringe values’ of popular and art traditions as well as the jazz idiom.

As a duo, they have won awards, ecstatic reviews and positive feedback, perhaps most tellingly from Umberto Eco, who writes: “Deliberately provocative music. They will always go to a place where the audience doesn’t expect to find them… The fusing of obviously incompatible traditions conjures up spirits from musical families that never were”.