“Ad Astra” is the first album as a leader by the Milanese saxophonist Angelo Domenico Alfieri, six instrumental pieces for eleven musicians, between jazz and Italian film music.
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Every now and then you have to detach yourself from the world. Turn off the phone, turn off the radio, remove the background noise and wander away for a while.
To do this you need the right soundtrack; this morning mine was «Ad Astra», Angelo Domenico Alfieri’s first album as a leader.
I’ve known Domenico for years, he also wrote for WECB, and I saw him cultivate this passion day after day, studying and making mistakes and trying again.
Six songs for thirty-three minutes of music, written between 2023 and 2025 for a band that grew one piece at a time. At the beginning there was a quintet with trumpet, tenor sax, piano, double bass and drums. Then came a trombone, finally a string quartet, added because the compositions asked for that timbre and no other.
Domenico’s sax holds all the colors and leads the game without being a showman. The virtuosity is there but it remains at the service of the writing. It’s a jazz that can be listened to even by those who usually give up after thirty seconds of soloing, and that doesn’t mean it gets watered down.
The coordinates and references are there: the harmony of Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock on the one hand, the soundtracks of Piero Piccioni, Piero Umiliani, Morricone and Nino Rota on the other, and in the background the psychedelia of Pink Floyd listened to as a teenager. According to Domenico, today’s jazz “looks too much at its own navel”. His album looks at the workshop of Italian composers who knew how to bring together the cultured and the popular, with a theme that makes you already watch the film when you hear it.
It’s worth reading the tracklist carefully, because the titles also tell a story beyond the music. We start with My tired prayer, with the fatigue of someone who has been asking for something for a long time, and not with the impulse towards the sky. It is an invocation that has already lost faith in the answer and continues anyway. And then there’s a Benson-style guitar solo and the song changes skin.
The eternal struggle against windmills (Adelante!) he takes from Cervantes the obstinacy of those who fight battles that cannot be won. The ivory door it recalls an image that goes from the Odyssey to the Aeneid: in the afterlife there are two doors, and false dreams pass through the ivory one. At the morning/Awakeningswhich closes the album, reverses the image with Dante, “but if near the morning of the truth one dreams”, because the dream dreamed at dawn is the one that comes true.
There is in the middle Sea of Tranquilitythe only astronomical title, the lunar sea where Apollo 11 landed. The stars of the title remain a horizon, and the farthest point that the disk actually touches is the Moon. I don’t know how much Domenico wanted it, but it is the most honest portrait of a debut: a declared ambition and a first concrete arrival.
Rainsthe single released on October 2, is the shortest and most melodic song, built with the logic of a pop song. Placed in fifth place, immediately before the closure, it ceases to be a business card and becomes a respite.
The half hour ends and I have to return to the world. I turn the phone back on, and the first thing I do is start the disk from the beginning.
SCORE: 7.50
TO LISTEN NOW
My weary prayer – The ivory door – Sea of Tranquility
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Impossible to skip anything… trust me and listen to it from start to finish. You won’t regret it!
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