The Giovanni Guidi Quintet competes at the BMW Welt Jazz Award. – Munich

Giovanni Guidi’s music falls out of time. Because the Steinway in the double cone of BMW World opens up a style museum for the pianist from Umbria, through which he strolls with benevolence. In some imaginary halls he pauses longer and reflects on the work of the old masters. The Jarrett Room, for example – midway through the Standard game’s rediscovery in the early 1980s – makes a deep impression on him and inspires him to pastiche. The Ibrahim Hall – also from the middle period, when church music harmony and swing were combined with Pan-African flow – impressed him above all with the lightness of the surface and allowed motifs such as the Senegalese “Fatou Yo” to flow into his own music.

The pedal as a means for the grand gesture

In general, Guidi presents himself together with his quintet in the context of the competition concerts of the BMW World Jazz Awards as an embracing worshiper of differences. His central means for the grand gesture is the pedal. It enables him to let everything flow into one another, hints of chamber-classic delicacy, motivic clarity and free simultaneity of the musical personalities on stage. And his partners also love the accessible. The saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti, for example, revels in the corduroy-jazzy comfort of the American mainstream with a veiled gaze, musically also well anchored in the eighties. Roberto Cecchetto prefers the guitaristic laconicism in the tinny Strat sound, while the bassist Joe Rehmer concentrates on the musical utility of solid, unobtrusive accompaniment. Only João Lobo seems stubborn at times, a reductionist on the drums, who gives form to the flowing concert segments in a rhythmically dry, skeletal manner. Otherwise, the opulence, the beautiful sound, the surge of well-being dominate with Giovanni Guidi as a guide through the sublime halls of the admirable.