Igor Ebuli Poletti “Mood Indigo” Review
I thought I’d take more time, to reflect for a few days, but being a highly unreflective and paroxysmal organism, here are a few inane words about this album by Filippo Bianchini that left me slightly upset, as they say in the worst tea shops in New York.
Records can sometimes be described like a road sign: names, intersections, turns, some useful and many useless indications, and then a quick escape in the opposite direction from the person who asked the way.
And then there are others. Filippo Bianchini’s “Mood Indigo” belongs to this second, more insidious and happily treacherous category, which behave like a move (not by chance), that is, like a shifting not only of objects but of moods, of invisible weights, of sonic memories that change location without asking permission;
This album forces the listener, at least me, to share a certain initial hesitation, then a growing abandonment, and finally a kind of slight vertigo that overtakes you when you realize that the rooms of the mental house we’re entering, while remaining the same—how could the opposite be true?—have changed their internal orientation.
The opening, that Jerry Potato, which might seem (to a distracted, guilty, ear) an ironic title, almost a childish game, instead introduces one of the most subtle keys to the entire work: the presence of Ettore, the son, his voice not yet disciplined by the grammar of the world, which bursts in like a luminous debris, a pre-logical splinter within a context of heightened compositional awareness. It’s not a simple affective expedient; it’s, rather, a poetic declaration: music as a language even before language, as a vibration that precedes the concept.
And from here we understand that Bianchini isn’t just composing pieces but emotional, almost Bartókian micro-ecosystems in which musical time bends to a broader, almost anthropological necessity. The quartet, composed of Nicola Andrioli on piano, Armando Luongo on drums, and Igor Spallati on double bass, doesn’t accompany but participates, engaging in a conversation with the soloist in a manner that never feels like a demonstration but always one of allusion.
Andrioli, in particular, moves like an architect who has decided to forgo straight lines: his harmonies don’t “support” Bianchini’s sax, they insinuate it, sometimes contradicting it with that oblique grace typical of pianists who have understood that true elegance is a form of controlled deviation. Luongo carefully avoids any temptation to illustrate: the drums don’t comment, but push, create rhythmic micro-pressures, small frictions that prevent the discourse from settling.
Spallati, finally, is the guardian of an elastic gravity: his double bass is never a mere foundation, but a living, thinking line, suggesting directions rather than imposing them.
To DS, dedicated to Dayna Stephens, is a particularly revealing musical object: the plurality of meters, which could easily degenerate into a stylistic exercise (and how many of these soulless rhythmic labyrinths have we heard!), is here reabsorbed into a melodic line that sings, that insists, that makes itself remembered. It is as if the complexity were permeated by a lyrical principle that redeems it from self-referentiality.
And this, let it be said bluntly, is rare; most contemporary writing either chooses apparent simplicity or takes refuge in sterile complexity, whereas Bianchini attempts, and often succeeds, in initiating a third path, more slippery but infinitely more fertile.
Then comes “Trasloco” where the conversation becomes, so to speak, viscous. Not in the sense of opaque, but of adherent: the music seems to stick to the inner walls of the listener, like still-wet paint. It’s a ballad, yes, but a ballad that has forgotten its nature, moving with a heavy slowness, like someone carrying an overfilled box without wanting to drop it. One senses that blend of melancholy and anticipation that accompanies every move: leaving something without having completely exhausted it, entering something that isn’t yet habitable. Bianchini’s sax, in this context, takes on an almost vocal quality, but a restrained voice, one that doesn’t want to declare everything, one that prefers to suggest.
“Every 3 Hours” picks up the thread of childhood, but does so with a temporal irregularity that is anything but random: the title itself alludes to a broken cyclicality, to that biological rhythm that eludes adult meter.
Here the quartet works by subtraction: they don’t fill in, they leave spaces, they create actual sound cavities in which the theme can resonate with greater clarity. It’s a piece that literally breathes.
Then, suddenly’’ Twist’’ and here the less attentive listener might think of a concession: the groove, the funk, the dance.
But it would be a mistake, a gross mistake, I’d say, to interpret it as a lighthearted moment. Twist is the demonstration that the body can be thought about without being rigid. The rhythm is engaging, yes, but never banal; the melody is memorable, but not predictable. It’s a dance that knows its own genealogy and reinvents it with a certain internal irony, as if to say: yes, we can move, but without forgetting that every movement is also a form of thought.
Dedo & Utrillo perhaps represents the album’s structural pinnacle.
The reference to Modigliani and Utrillo isn’t decorative: in that almost paroxysmal progression, one senses a desire to build through accumulation, through slow stratification. The circular melody that returns, changes, and expands functions like a hypnotic device, but one of vigilant hypnosis, in which each repetition is slightly different, as if memory itself were undergoing constant revision. The crescendo is not only dynamic, but semantic: the piece “says” more and more, without ever raising its voice in an uncoordinated manner, and the tenor voice has, in this writer’s opinion, a timbre that reminds me of a forgotten but extraordinary Italian saxophonist, Eraldo Volontè.
Finally, ‘’Mood Indigo’’ the risk of comparing oneself to Duke Ellington was enormous, which meant exposing oneself to an unforgiving tradition. And yet, Bianchini chooses the more difficult path: not to imitate, not to distort, but to rework. His version seeks not effect, but a form of respectful and at the same time personal continuity.
Ellington, after all, is treated not as a monument, but as an interlocutor: a living presence, a beacon, to use Bianchini’s own words, who guides without blinding.
One could, at this point, attempt a synthesis, an operation that is always suspect, but sometimes inevitable and often futile, as it certainly is in this case.
Mood Indigo is an album about measure. Not in the sense of moderation, but in the oldest and most demanding sense of the term: the ability to shape a material without exceeding or impoverishing it.
Each piece finds its own unstable balance between melody and structure, between anticipation and surprise, between writing and improvisation, and perhaps, more profoundly, it is an album about relationships.
The relationship between the musicians is evident, built over years of sonic coexistence, but also a relationship between different levels of experience: the private (the child, the house, the move), the broadly cultural (Ellington, Modigliani, Utrillo), the musical (forms, meters, languages).
Everything coexists without rigid hierarchies, as in those paintings where the background, at a certain point, demands the same status as the foreground.
And so, if one really wanted to find a conclusive image—arbitrary, certainly, but perhaps not entirely unfounded—one could say that Mood Indigo resembles a room painted white that one has just moved into. The furniture is in place, but not completely; there are still a few boxes to open; the light enters slightly differently than expected. And precisely because of this, because of this slight initial imperfection, because of this not-yet-saturated openness, the music breathes. And it continues to do so even after the last sound has faded, like a discreet yet tenacious presence, a kind of echo that doesn’t want to, and perhaps shouldn’t, stop thinking.
Igor Ebuli Poletti,
-March 2026-
Flavio Caprera “Mood Indigo” Review
“This new work by Filippo Bianchini is a dazzling album. Music that engages, captivates, and surprises.
A modern sound yet firmly rooted in African-American tradition, supported by a distinctive melodic vein that makes each composition a story in itself…”
Flavio Caprera – Jazz Convention – LINK
-May 2026-