Source: https://ukvibe.org/album_reviews/ilaria-capalbo-2/
Motherhood has a way of dismantling working methods along with everything else, and the Stockholm-based Neapolitan bassist Ilaria Capalbo has had the good sense not to fight it. The Brightest Sun, her second album as leader for Bluenord Records, was assembled from voice memos, sketches and Post-it notes during pregnancy. In the earliest months of her child’s life, rather than tidying those fragments into the layered, literary architecture of 2022’s Karthago — a record that filtered destruction and renewal through the history of ancient Carthage — she has left the seams showing. It is a braver decision than it sounds, and the writing is quietly remarkable for it.
The opening ‘Arrival’, at seven and a half minutes the longest piece here, sets out the terms: Capalbo’s double bass is the gravitational centre, unhurried and resonant, around which Andreas Hourdakis’ guitar flickers and refracts. I’ll admit his presence gave me pause on first listen — there are moments where the guitar threatens to crowd the room — but by the second and third spins of the CD I’d changed my mind entirely. Hourdakis is the element that makes this album distinctive, and Capalbo clearly knows it: his colour and volatility are the friction against which her compositions spark. The two-horn front line of Fredrik Nordström on tenor and Thomas Backman on alto and bass clarinet is deployed with real intelligence — sometimes in keening unison, sometimes pulling against each other in the freer passages — while Henrik Jäderberg’s drumming holds the whole enterprise together without ever flattening its volatility.
Much of the material is improvised, and you can hear it: ‘Prophecy’ and ‘Cosmos/Earth’ move between churning collective energy and passages of near-stillness with a fluency that only comes from a band with genuine history. ‘Two Visions’, a brief trio piece co-composed by Capalbo, Nordström and Hourdakis, is the album’s quiet hinge — three minutes of suspended, chamber-like intimacy that earns its place at the record’s centre. ‘Little Tiger’ is the most immediately affectionate thing here, its title telling you everything about its dedication. In contrast, the closing title track gathers up the album’s threads of vulnerability and force into something quietly radiant.
Capalbo has spoken of wanting to convey “the vulnerability of a delicate and suspended time”, a landscape she remembers as fractured and soaring at once, and that description fits the music precisely. The rock and indie inflexions in her background surface in the electric bass and effects she folds into the ensemble sound, but this remains improvised music of real substance — raw in ways Karthago never allowed itself to be. This is a record that asks something of the listener and repays it fully; each return uncovers detail the last pass missed, which is the surest measure of work built to last. At a compact thirty-seven minutes, it makes its case without a wasted gesture, and it confirms Capalbo as one of the most distinctive bandleaders at work anywhere on the European scene. The album is out now on CD, with a vinyl pressing to follow, and those in Italy this summer can catch Capalbo live on 26 July at Riccione Summer Jazz, where she appears alongside pianist Chihiro Yamanaka and drummer Gerald Cleaver.
