Perigeo: the most competent Italian prog-band

Perigeo have skilfully incorporated the aesthetics of jazz-rock into an utterly personal language. The group's main driving force was bassist Giovanni Tommaso, but it was the combined forces of all the musicians that created this unprecedented sound mixture. In particular, Franco D'Andrea, who was to become one of the most acclaimed stars of jazz piano, and the visionary saxophonist Claudio Fasoli, a true stylist of this instrument, contributed solo interventions, which had nothing to envy from their American colleagues, to the group's sound. 

The language is that of jazz with compositions based on powerful vamps, but with articulated structures that are associated with prog. Perhaps the band that comes closest to Perigeo is Ian Carr Belladonna, but in that case the derivation from Miles Davis is more evident. 

Perigee developed an inimitable musical discourse, which made them an international cult band.

They acted as a backing band for Soft Machine and Weather Report, but over the course of the two tours, the Italian group ended up overshadowing Soft Machine and made Weather Report suffer to the point that their contract was revoked during the tour.

(Enrico Merlin, Italian musicologist and jazz guitar player)

Perigeo is probably my fave Italian band, partly because of the Miles/Machine/Nucleus heritage.

I don't see much Weather Report influence, though

The second song seems to convey a feeling and style that Eumir Deodato would make popular a couple years later in America with cream of the top American jazz players, though there are also Tony Williams Lifetime feelings to it as well (despite the excellent funky bass). I'm am loving this rhythm section! The drummer is wonderful!  

The spacious third song opens with the nice Fender Rhodes and electric bass interplay. As sax joins in and then drummer's cymbal play, the keyboard moves to a repeating chord progression while electric guitar and sax solo over the gentle jazz. This reminds me of both The Soft Machine and Miles. As it develops it reminds me more of the works of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders in the late 1960s.

Side Two's title songs seems to continue the spacious forms from the previous song, though this one a little more free jazz-like. Piano, bowed bass and tuned percussion sounds. This sounds so much like the opening of Return to Forever's "The Romantic Warrior"! (Did Chick steal it from Tommaso?) Then, halfway through, the band pauses to come together for a structured full band presentation--one in which the presentation of the main melody is traded off among the instrumentalists in a kind of call-and-response rondo! Cool! Then Franco goes off on a wild piano solo while guitar and bass keep the vehicle on the road (with drummer providing some very entertaining accents and embellishments).  

The second song on Side Two opens with gentle Fender Rhodes chords supporting the twin melody-making of  saxophone and Tommaso's reverbed vocalise. Very cool little interlude!

The final songs breaks out sounding very much like a song from The Soft Machine. The dirty electric guitar takes the first lead over the steady drummer, Fender Rhodes chord play, and bullet-note delivery of the bass. The rhythm section is really moving! And the melody lines are awesome! Impressive drum solo in the fourth minute. These guys can all play but the drummer, keyboardist, saxophonist, and bass player are all of the very highest caliber!

An excellent jazz-rock fusion album--one of the best j-r fuse debut albums ever! 

Okay, Lorenzo! I'm beginning to get why you started this thread. And I'm SO GLAD you did!

Hi,

Thanks ... listening to it now!

Already heard the first album, and now on the 2nd (1976).

It's nice stuff and well done, no doubt about it. However, to my ears this is very reminiscent of the jazz scene in LA in the early 70's ... and I say this almost because there was, for all the years until I left Santa Barbara, a jazz show prior to Guy's show, previously all the way to 2AM, and a couple of years later, until midnight, when Guy would take over.

That does not mean that it isn't good ... it is very good, and for the time slot (early 70's) it makes itself known and can easily be mentioned as outstanding, and I have to agree to an extent ... when we ended up hearing PFM, Banco, Le Orme by 1972, this band, if we had heard it, would be considered very interesting indeed, although I am not sure that it could be compared favorably with the jazz/rock thing in the early 70's around LA. The show, before Guy's was done by a gentleman that was a technician (as well as DJ part time, I think) at KMET in LA ... and he moonlighted in Santa Barbara with his show on tape, but I can not tell you how exact that is. 

It was an interesting time, and hearing PERIGIO now, makes one think that indeed, that was some far out stuff, and I agree, it was ... but they were not the only ones. Europe's trends, were not as "jazz" founded as things were in America (thus harder to locate/find), and that is one thing and reason why you don't hear many bands doing that kind of stuff, although, if memory serves me right, Jukka Tolonen/Tasavalan Presidenti would be somewhat similar, and indeed, Odyssey (Terje Rypdal's early work) was also very jazz oriented, although not quite within a format that we were familiar with ... the long stuff in those albums, is (for my ears) a bit towards the freedom and ability that Miles had ... who would be a very good influence in Europe and even early Jan Garbarek was going crazy as well as many others within the jazz scene that appears to have woken up in the very early 70's, of which a Perigio would be a part ... though I have not exactly studied/listened to a lot more "jazz/rock" blends out of Europe at that time.

Those two albums are very good, and worthy of a collector of progressive music for sure!