Sometimes magic happens. Sometimes, emotions enwrap you in a way you’ve rarely experienced before. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of freedom: the freedom to create, improvise, process, and re-process, without specific references, deadlines, or obligations to please whatever markets or audiences with clear-cut styles and sound signatures.
Actually, this Tomat Petrella affair is quite unexpected. It’s a game of two: Turin-based Davide Tomat, who has over twenty years experience as a multi-instrumentalist, band leader, and sound designer in several Italian projects (Niagara, N.A.M.B., and founder of the Superbudda collective); and musician Gianluca Petrella, hailing from southern Italy but in fact a citizen of the world and - more importantly - one of the most revered and inventive jazz trombone players in the world from the last decade or so (as stated on several Down Beat Critics’ Polls and proven on his Blue Note and ECM releases).
“Kepler”, their collaborative effort, is a beast of a different nature. It has so many textures, intuitions, and complexities that you can hardly list this simply as a “jazz-meets-electronica” project. So much cheesy, well-educated, nicely predictable music has been produced under that moniker, but so far none of them have had “it”.