Andrea Grossi Blend 3

Blend 3 is an organism made up of three different but similar personalities. The group explores the diverse sonorities of a trio that, without a predetermined set, utilizes composition and improvisation as its only resources. By means of this combination of composition and improvisation, what is already written is proposed in an original and revisited way time after time. Concurrently, improvisation as an actual practice rather than as a genre is developed with a deep compositional function. Blend 3 does not know how many pieces it will play or how long it will improvise for. The only thing it knows is its primary need: to come alive repeatedly by researching a constant sense of uniqueness.

The lubok was a type of popular Russian print widely spread in the 1800s that was hand-colored by women who brushed large spots of bright colors over the painted scenes. The overlap between the colors and the scenes highlighted some details of the picture and, at the same time, created a sort of abstract structure in juxtaposition with the original image. After seeing some of these prints, I was deeply moved. The powerful contrast between the pure bright color and the simplicity – although often refined – of the print, and the fact that those very bright spots were highlighting some traits of the underlying picture, immediately created a whole universe of sonorities inside of me. I have been working for a while attempting to merge and mix different languages, hence the name Blend, and I feel as if the lubok, in some way, symbolizes my phase of research that is based on musical “traditions” of the 1900s but also a personal forward-looking style. (Andrea Grossi)

Manuel Caliumi – alto sax
Michele Bonifati – electric guitar
Andrea Grossi – double bass, compositions