Peter Primamore Grancia

This Charming Man

Grancia
Peter Primamore

Blue Apples Music
1st September 2006

There’s a tendency to underestimate this album with its oddly quaint, folksy allure.

On first listen it sounds like the soundtrack to a well-produced television drama series, unobtrusively setting the out the shades and moods we can expect to encounter for the duration; sombre, uplifting, questioning, serious, playful, etc.

Yet it’s obvious from the first few cascading bars of “Silver Stones”, with its sparkling piano and glossy violins we’re listening to a classy, well-scripted vehicle for an ensemble cast rather than a showcase for a swaggering star.

The idea behind the project was to record an album without the usual click tracks, samples, synthesisers and masses of overdubs in order to create music that felt in the composer’s words, “organic…and in someway alive.”

Primamore’s experience as a composer for film and TV, a medium where the clock is king, gives his writing an emotionally directness with little room for waste or superfluous decoration. It’s also intensely intimate, a direct result of the company of 13 musicians, including piano, strings, harp, woodwind, vibes as well as guitar, bass and drums.

Concise solos (guitarist Chieli Minucci is especially good in this department), sensitive arrangements, luxuriant orchestration and an oddly old-world patina all adds to something that feels like “real” music, human and warm. Listening to this disc in either 5.1 (it’s a SACD hybrid) or headphones, it's as though one is literally in the room with the performers.

“Crossing Over” is a graceful melody whose nuances are beautifully carried by oboe and harp, each recorded either side of a stereo mike. Sometimes the simplest things can be the hardest to achieve and in this Primamore achieves a stunning success. Dispensing with the aural window-dressing and letting the music talk for itself is especially true of “Lullaby / Elegy”, a striking and touching duet between the composer on piano and Tony Levin.

Elsewhere, classical, rock and jazzy moods are all brought into service and though there are times when it gets near the wrong side of cute, it nearly always manages to pull back.

Charming may not sound like a ringing endorsement but it happens to be an entirely appropriate handle for this album. Just in case you’re thinking that this amounts to something of a backhanded compliment, let me tell you that my dictionary defines charm as “the power of delighting, attracting or fascinating” and Grancia manages to do all three.

You can listen to samples from this album and buy it here.