Bursting out with a terse little curlicue of a groove, Davide Tammaro’s “Jungle” combines the sharp intellect of progressive rock into a muscular jazz cadence. It’s a soundscape that perfectly mirrors his subject, the always-bustling New York City.
A native of Naples, Italy, now living in Brooklyn, Tammaro is joined by a stamping drummer in Alessio Romano, who also engineered and mixed “Jungle.” His rhythms, complex and gregarious, echo a fully awakened city’s bustling traffic flow. Pasquale Strizzi then adds a series of trickling interjections on electric piano, very much in the style of Chick Corea’s 1970s excursions.
Tammaro, a student of Maestro Raimondo Di Sandro in his native country and later a Berklee graduate, displays both a newcomer’s wonder at the stirring motion around him – and a just-right ability to shift styles. When he returns to the fore here, it’s with a newfound assertiveness, even more closely hewing to a volcanic rock aesthetic. After a fiery solo, Tammaro then circles back to the initial riff that launched “Jungle,” but with a nastier attitude.
His band, rounded out by bassist Reuben Cainer, then launches into a dizzying eruption of sound – exiting amid a torrent of thrilling dissonance, like the light dying out over the screeches and horns of the Big Apple.
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