Kato’s Gems #4

Emanuele De Raymondi

The first album of this fourth round of Kato’s Gems is “Ultimo domicilio” by Emanuele De Raymondi, released in 2013 for ZeroKilled Music, a label founded by another Italian artist who has found luck abroad, Costanza Francavilla. Treated pianos, synthetic strings and post-glitch hints that mark the pinnacle of creativity of the Italian composer. “Brooklyn” clears away melancholy, poised between birth and death, between electronics and classical instrumentation. The cover of the photographer Lorenzo Castore is the ideal starting point of the album, a journey through places of migration and war.

Ti-Paris

If you are a lover of Haitian music or more generally of Caribbean music, this is a record that cannot be missing from your collection. Imagine a hot summer, an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, a box of mangoes and a small ramshackle turntable. Ti-Paris is considered the father of Haitian music and bands like The Troubadours have been deeply influenced by his music. The first print of this record is quite expensive and rare to find, this is a 2014 limited edition reissue.

Dizzy Gillespie

Today’s latest record is Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bahiana”, released in 1975. In the 1940s he was one of the first major American artists to be interested in Latin jazz, but this record is a real hidden treasure, probably his best work in that decade. The interest in the Brazilian Bossa Nova had largely disappeared, replaced by the movement of tropicalism on one side and the disco-fusion of Deodato on the other one. This album instead, thanks also to the contribution of Paulinho Da Costa to percussion and the guitarist Alexander Gafa, is focused on hypnotic and, at times, carnivalesque rhythms.