John Abriani

The work of the ’20s and ’30s Italian bandleader, who doubled on saxophones and violin, is unfortunately documented sparsely on recordings. He represents among the first of jazz fusion experimenters for the reason that his music mixed areas of both dance music group and traditional jazz music, from an Italian perspective, normally. Like many great bandleaders, John Abriani was known for his knack at nabbing normally interesting soloists and devising frameworks for offering them, in his case a tiny matter necessarily since he had not been a lot of a soloist. Abriani was raised on the far side of the mountains in Switzerland, which is definitely where his profession in music started. With his sibling, Felice Abriani, a banjoist aswell as violinist, he created an orchestra that performed in cafes. Between 1925-1932, the Abriani brothers performed regular gigs in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. This is actually the period where many the recordings of the groups result from, as the Homocord clothing cut several edges in 1927 and 1928. The repeated “ONLY ONCE Once again” and melodically aromatic “State It Having a Crimson Rose” were well-known records in European countries, yet many information regarding them stay as hazy as an Alpine fog, like the feasible involvement of trumpeter Arthur Briggs, supposedly the 1st dark jazz musician to execute within the continent. Talking about pioneering attempts in the genre, John Abriani himself experienced the courage to consider an Italian jazz music group to Calcutta, where he kept down a reliable gig between 1932-1934. There have been also recordings carried out in this stint, portion of a HMV Twin catalog of both jazz and old-timey music distributed in India in the ’30s and the main topic of many an archive enthusiasts’ sweaty nightmares. John Abriani came back from India in 1934 and was a dynamic performer in European countries throughout the 10 years, with further edges slice from 1937 on. All informed, nevertheless, discographer Tom Lord discovers only a complete of eight documenting credits for Abriani in the ’20s and ’30s mixed. In the ’40s he resolved in his indigenous Italy, where he continued to be with significantly less of a existence within the music picture over another several decades.