In April 2026, the free-fusion Claudio Scolari Project offered up a new set of recordings, Lines Of Now, their eighth album over the last eight years and tenth overall. It’s been a very productive run for Italy’s foremost dual-family improv music outfit, but the improvisation is the very thing that enables the bountiful output: when the quartet convenes in the studio, they don’t mess around, they take sketches from the band’s namesake Claudio Scolari (drums, synth programming) and Daniele Cavalca (drums, keyboards), plug in their instruments and jump right into it. They flesh out those outlines while the tape is rolling. When you listen to this or any other CSP album, you’re hearing the creation process as the end product.
As it’s been for a while, Scolari and Cavalca have been the lynchpins with Scolari’s son Simone (trumpet) and Cavalca’s brother Michele (electric bass) as indispensable pieces for their ability to make so much out of so little scoring. Carrying forward a new family tradition established with 2025’s Bloom, Cavalca sister Ilaria makes the quartet a quintet for a few tracks with her vocals.
“Subtle Currents” gets the whole foursome intensely involved, but the main lead lines belong to Michele and Simone. The Claudio/Daniele bedrock sets the stage, however, a shimmering Rhodes and gurgling synth washes cast against a grinding groove and the trademark wide spaces between the instruments. Creating on the fly on a single key, early Miles fusion experiments is the North Star, but distinguishes itself by committing to the ‘live in the studio’ vitality.
Even when synthesizer sequencing is employed as with “Fractured Horizon,” it’s used as a centerpiece around which rhythm and soloing is structured. This jam breathes like a living creature, taking in the collective inputs from the band members to form a dense mass only to exhale and let it melt away and repeat the cycle again.
Daniele expands his arsenal of sounds with each release. Harp-like strums and heavy metal guitar sonorities pepper “Between Seconds,” while Claudio’s drums muddy the line between time-keeping and improvising.
“Moving Echoes” could have been a Jon Hassell creation if he had composed and arranged the song as he was recording it. “The Next Breath” spontaneously metastasizes into 70s funk-jazz when Daniele chances upon a righteous riff on electric piano.
Back on electric piano playing an evolving riff, Daniele leads “Holding Still,” as Simone instantly picks up cues and spins melodic lines from them. “Where We Pause” reminds us of the symbiosis between Claudio and Daniele that enables them to simultaneously solo on drums and do so with such cohesion.
Ilaria’s mostly wordless vocal adds an extra lead voice to “First Light,” taking on a character that blends in well with Simone’s trumpet. Ilaria returns — even more prominently — for “A Sudden Silence,” a song where Michele undertakes to be the main deliverer of the melody instead of brother Daniele. With only Michele’s bass the only instrument playing, Ilaria’s reverberant voice echoes into the stillness during “Edge Of Silence.”
The plot for Lines Of Now is the same as the Claudio Scolari Project’s previous nine albums, but the idea of making music in the moment never needs to change. This album builds on over a decade and a half of knowing each other at an instinctual level and their instincts have never been better.
Grab a copy of Lines Of Now today from Bandcamp.
- Claudio Scolari Project – ‘Lines Of Now’ (2026) - June 4, 2026
- Columbia Icefield – ‘A Silence Opens’ (2026) - May 30, 2026
- Jazz drummer phenom Devin Gray: Something Else! Interview (Part 2 of 2) - May 28, 2026
