Description
Giovanni Guidi – A New Day – Vinyl Record
Giovanni Guidi’s A New Day is a solo piano album released in 2015 on ECM Records. It stands as one of the most intimate and conceptually focused recordings in Guidi’s discography, built entirely around improvisations inspired by the music of Thelonious Monk—though it is not a straightforward tribute album of covers.
Recorded in Lugano, Switzerland, the album captures Guidi alone at the piano, working in a space of restraint and reflection. Rather than reinterpreting Monk compositions directly, Guidi uses fragments, harmonic ideas, and rhythmic attitudes associated with Monk as departure points. The result is a set of original improvisations that feel connected to Monk’s spirit—angular phrasing, unexpected pauses, dissonant clusters—but filtered through Guidi’s own more lyrical and spacious aesthetic.
The ECM production approach is central to the album’s impact. Known for clarity and atmosphere, ECM gives the piano a warm, resonant presence, allowing silence and sustain to play as important a role as the notes themselves. Guidi’s touch ranges from delicate, almost whispered passages to more forceful, percussive attacks, but even at its most intense the album maintains a contemplative tone. The pacing feels deliberate; pauses and breathing space are as meaningful as melodic statements.
Across its roughly 45-minute runtime, A New Day unfolds like a continuous meditation rather than a collection of discrete songs. The improvisations are episodic but connected, with recurring motifs and rhythmic hints that subtly nod toward Monk without becoming imitation. Guidi avoids caricature; instead of exaggerating Monk’s angularity, he distills the influence into structure and mood.
Within Guidi’s career, the album marks an important step in establishing him not only as a strong trio leader but as a compelling solo pianist capable of sustaining narrative and emotional depth without accompaniment. For listeners interested in modern European jazz piano, A New Day offers a thoughtful, minimal, and deeply focused listening experience—one that honors jazz history while remaining unmistakably contemporary.
Rekindling the familiarly flowing interplay with fellow travellers Thomas Morgan and João Lobo – the trio’s musical partnership goes back over a decade at this point –, on A New Day Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi moreover expands the group’s instrumental grasp with the introduction of American saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, who makes his ECM debut here. Not only is the ensemble scope widened; with Brandon Lewis in tow, new dialects and fresh perspectives are broached, and different instrumental paths taken, inspired by an overall heightened sense of communication and Lewis’s unmistakable, confident tone. Recorded at Studios La Buissonne, Southern France, in August 2023, the album was produced by Manfred Eicher.
Brand new, never played and still in the factory plastic sealed
Track Listing
Cantos Del Ocells
To A Young Student
Means For A Rescue
Only Sometimes
Luigi (The Boy Who Lost His Name)
My Funny Valentine
Wonderland
