This performance of Sadness captured on video by Dave Logan represents the musical exchange between Buck Curran and Jodi Pedrali (aka Joud) in full bloom: languorous and warm tonal meditations slowly rising…sustaining….soundscapes of shadow and light and the space between the notes filling their small practice room before dissipating into the ether of a cold evening in the winter of 2022.
The video represents just one of many evenings in which Buck Curran and Jodi Pedrali spent time together playing in deep harmony at their rehearsal-recording space at Club Druso in Bergamo, Italy, between late 2019 and October 2022. The tune – influenced by the moods of John Coltrane’s lamentation Alabama and Ornette Coleman’s Sadness (from the ESP-Disk’ release Town Hall 1962) – is a reflection of our times and rooted in the continuing disharmony and struggles of the human race – the music winds like a slow-moving river through an uncertain landscape…a pathway filled with abstraction and intention and yet out of this heart of uncertainty and despair, their music is imbued with delicate waves of glimmering light and hope.
About One Evening and Other Folk Songs
The foundation of this recording is the musical chemistry between Jodi Pedrali and myself. Jodi and I had been playing music together since 2017, and the band we assembled for this session centred around the idea of having London native Dave Barbarossa play the drums with us. Dave Barbarossa (Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant) was my favourite drummer during my formative years playing the guitar in high school. Dave and I first met over a pint in London (in Soho) in April of 2022. We talked about fatherhood and life, but mostly about music. It was wonderful to discover that he shared my love for the music of Pentangle. Soon after that meeting, we started discussing the idea of recording a Live session in the manner of some of the performances of Pentangle that we had watched on my cell phone in the pub. And so once Dave agreed to fly to Bergamo to record with me and Jodi – to round out the session we recruited the brilliant Italian singer Adele Pappalardo and bass player Robert Frassini Moneta.
The essence of what we documented on this record is the energy of a quickly assembled group who had never played together before, and due to time restrictions, we arranged parts and rehearsed for only a few hours the day before entering the studio. All the songs performed by the band were recorded in the studio by Marco Fasolo as a ‘Live’ session (4, 5, and 6 July 2022) – the tracks we used were from first or second-take performances (Jodi and I really wanted to capture the energy of playing music together Live in the same space). I can hear things got a little loose in places, but overall we were really happy with how we all played together and grateful for recording the energy of that moment during those fleeting summer days in 2022.
~ Buck Curran, February 7th, 2024
‘One Evening and Other Folk Songs’ releases on 24 May 2024 on ESP-Disk’/Obsolete Recordings (Digital and CD).
Download Sadness via Bandcamp: https://obsoleterecordings.bandcamp.com/track/sadness-2
Stream: Spotify | Apple Music