New Album: Ferdinando Romano, Invisible Painters

Italian bassist Ferdinando Romano releases his new album Invisible Painters for the Italian label Jam/UnJam and Universal Music. 

After his debut album, Totem, featuring Ralph Alessi, who gave him numerous awards like the magazine’s Musica Jazz Critics’ Poll award as Best Italian Rising Star 2020, the SIAE Award 2021 and many international press reviews, Ferdinando Romano felt the need for exploring new sound territories.

The influences in this new music are miscellaneous, taking inspiration from artists like Craig Taborn, John Hollenbeck, Aphex Twin and Olivier Messiaen

Invisible Painters has been recorded in quartet with Elias Stemeseder (pianist of the Jim Black Trio, Philipp Gropper’s Philm, John Zorn, Peter Evans and winner of Deutscher Jazzpreis 2023), on piano and synthesizers; Federico Calcagno (Top Jazz 2020, among the protagonists of the Italian and Dutch scene) on clarinet and bass clarinet; Evita Polidoro (sideman with Dee Dee Bridgewater, Enrico Rava) on drums and featuring the amazing Christine Ott on the rare instrument Ondes Martenot (which she played live and on albums of Yann Tiersen and Radiohead) on La Figurazione delle Cose Invisibili. Ferdinando played doublebass, synth, samples, modular synthetizers, field recordings.

The image of the invisible painters symbolically represents the gesture of artistic creation, the unconscious and instinctive impulse it generates, the invisible hand and brush with which the improviser creates extemporaneously. It is precisely in this balance between awareness and instinct, composition and extemporaneity that the music of this new group is born, making use of the nuances of timbre that acoustic instruments, synthesizers, samples, field recordings and instruments’ preparation generate in enriching the improvisational palette.

For more information, visit online at ferdinandoromano.com