An Old Picture in Black and White
Deep Night.
Big City Lights, bar Signs and a boozer drowning pains and sorrows in his last glass.
A continuous flux of car lights run fastly into the streets.
Inside, a man absorbed in thoughts turns on the radio and goes on WJAZ, where the voice of Lester the Nightfly will be his sole companion until daylight.
A metropolitan disc-jockey, surprised at 4:10 in the morning inside his room used as a radio, like most free radios since the early Sixties.
The last LP of Mingus, or Rollins, or Monk, maybe Davis, then the microphone goes on the turntable. The umpteenth cigarette between the fingers and the others already reduced to ashes or waiting inside the package.
This is the image that the author gives to the cover of his disc: The Nightfly of Donald Fagen.
The Disc
The work of Fagen is a “concept album”: a journey, in music, through the America of the late 50s, which was “rich” in contrasts. The promise of a better future, paradoxically, realized with a war of tears. A country where a man could say he “had a dream” he continued to do in his eternal alcove. A country full of fragile desires and sparkling promises.
A revolutionary album for jazz, funky and pop: an unprecedented synthesis between these musical genres that Donald Fagen intertwines with each other, exploiting the most complex jazz harmonies to melodic sounds of pop, experimenting with funky rhythms that led to make dance the most incapable of dancers .
Compositions curated by the year, sound definition at the highest recording standards of those years. “The Nightfly” was for decades the disc used to test the audio quality of hi-fi systems all over the world: “Between CD and LP, the latter is considered superior and remains one of the audiophile references. (Wikipedia)”
The final result is nothing less of perfection and surprise.
The Pairing
For this journey through the Di Marzo Cellars tasting the Greco di Tufo “Colle Serrone”, Ritmo diVino was inspired by the artistic work of Donald Fagen.
The Greco di Tufo “Colle Serrone” of Di Marzo, together with the album “The Nightfly”, are two masterpieces of the tradition.
Two stories, the one of the Greco di Tufo and the one of the recording work, told and expressed in different forms but with the same spirit of moving and moving the senses.
