JEMMA

The beautiful opening piece, "Timelapse", is completely instrumental and is paradigmatic of the musical direction followed by the band. It ranges in different musical territories with continuous changes of rhythm and atmosphere. Maybe, it's not by chance that the title refers to a photographic technique in which the frequency at which film frames are captured is much lower than the frequency used to view the sequence. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapse..

"Kaneloriza" is a famous traditional song from Asia Minor, in the past interpreted, among others, by Domna Samiou, a prominent Greek researcher and performer of Greek folk music, or Nana Mouskouri. This version blends Rebetiko music style and jazz. The song evokes the dangerous charm of a beautiful cinnamon girl...

From the east shores of the Mediterranean Sea then we sail to the western coasts, towards Spain. "Hija mia mi querida" is a piece that comes from the Sephardic tradition and shows us an example of a poetic and musical genre developed in the Iberian Peninsula since the Middle Age. Although it starts by an acoustic pattern and ethnic flavours, there is no room for flamenco sketches here and soon the music veers into a different direction with a great electric guitar solo...

"Love Road Song" begins softly and the atmosphere is dreamy, with piano trumpet and violin in the forefront. Then the rhythm rises, the pace takes speed and you're off on the road, ready to new musical adventures, like Pytheas of Massalia, a Greek geographer, explorer and astronomer who made a voyage of exploration to Northern Europe in about 325 BC. He was the first known Greek scientific visitor to see and describe the Arctic, polar ice, and the Celtic and Germanic tribes. He is also the first person on record to describe the midnight sun. Pytheas introduced the idea of distant Thule to the geographic imagination, and his account of the tides is the earliest one known that suggests the moon as their cause...

I spent all the previous words about Pytheas to introduce the following track, "I Iriden Sa", an old Swedish folk song full of pagan symbolism. From the Mediterranean Sea to North Europe and snowy landscapes. An Italian band singing in Swedish? To appreciate Jemma's work I invite you to compare this piece with the version of the same song by prog folk Finnish band Gjallarhorn in their 1998 album "Ranarop - Call Of The Sea Witch"...

"Ossi di sabbia" (Sand bones) is a beautiful original piece sung in part in Italian and in part in an ancient dialect called Portolotto that was spoken in all the ports of the Adriatic sea because it was the "lingua franca" of the navy. It was derived from the Venetian language and was almost incomprehensible to most of the people on land. According to the band, "it tells the story of the journey of human beings across the sea, a fabric that connects lands and cultures. To pay even more homage to its meaning we wanted to write the lyrics in Portolotto, a language used by sailors of the Mediterranean. The sand bones are the mineralization of human stories, adventures, difficulties and everything that the sea and the wind can tell about our lives"...

"Winding Way" is an original instrumental track that features the guest Gianluca Petrella on trombone. It takes us with a light pace through jazz rock territories and leads to the final piece, "Nenia Grika" a delicate lullaby that ends the album leaving us amidst dreamy atmospheres in a pleasant sense of peace with a coda in crescendo that might recall PFM...

On the whole, a very good work!