Franco Cerri :: Biography

		BIOGRAPHY ( in Italian >>> ) Please note: this is an old version and it is going to be replaced by a translation based on the final version of the italian text (now available in beta). FRANCO CERRI Guitarist,born in Milano 29/1/1926. An expressive language, recognizable at once, his enthusiasm which remained the same in the years, his will to follow always new projects, characterize Franco Cerri's personality, not only the most popular (and the most authoritative) Italian guitarist, but also one of the most important stylist in the European jazz world, in which the great guitarists weren't missing. Cerri, whose training was an interely autodidactical one, is the classic example of an artist that builds his technique not in abstract but on his own expressive needs, as it always happened in jazz among the most creative artists (the case of Thelonious Monk is sensational in this sense). He developed as a jazz man with the be-bop, whose painful impulse has been tempered, as time goes on, by the search for soft and persuasive harmonies. A phrasing results from this, a phrasing built on contrasts, on a sequence of both homogeneous and heterogeneous melodic elements, as a result of a creative inspiration, based on the feeling of the moment, never estabilished in advance or full of cliché. A sense of color that devotes itself to the harmonic parameter too, that he masters with simplicity, elaborated with unusual combinations always compatible with the tonality of the piece that he is playing, where he can point out his melodic taste in the rare ability "to let the progressions of the tunes sing". Both in a solo and in accompainment, with expert taste, it emerges his most precious quality: a wonderful rythmic nature, inclined on its own accord towards the most explicit and involving swing, that it spreads to the pronunciation of the sentences too, to their inner breath, in the same way in which notes are fastened. He began his long and prolific career in 1945, with Gorni Kramer; and in 1949 he accompanied Django Reinhard, his first and real guitarist influence and Jimmy Raney and Barney Kessel's (fundamental) influences, maybe the origin of the sound, sharp and and cutting sound of the '50s, arriving to Wes Mongomery and Jim Hall, maybe the real origin of the discovery of softer and more mellow sonorities. In the '50s he was near great jazz masters: from Chet Baker to Gerry Mulligan, from Billie Holliday to Lee Konitz, to Modern Jazz Quartet musicians and others, and he became a leader in the Italian and European jazz world. Next decades will be characterized by an intense concert activity and by the beginning of his collaboration with Italian TV, that will allow him to become a famous artist, thanks to popular programmes in which famous national and international jazzmen took part. As a leader of his own quartets and quintets, in which there were also new Italian talents such as Gianluigi Trovesi and Tullio de Piscopo, from the '70s he began to develop the work of arrangement, reflecting on score, the peculiarities of his style. In 1980 he started a musical companionship with one of the best Italian jazz artists, the pianist and composer Enrico Intra, making a quartet that you can listen to in the LP: Pregiata ditta dal 1980, recorded in 1990 for Ariston. In the last decade he was an organizer and he made his teaching activity more frequent inside The Associazione Culturale Musica Oggi (Cerri is one of the founders, together with Intra, of this association), that manages the Civici Corsi di Jazz in Milan and he organized a lot of concert festivals. Franco Cerri's discography is, on the contrary, rather meagre (these records can't be almost found). We point out the anthology 'Di Jazz in Jazz' (Dire) that is not to lose and it includes meaningful pieces, and with several groups, in a cronological order from the '50s till now. And, then, the recent Cerri&Cerri (Dire), with his son Stefano, and the planning " A Django: En Souvenir De Milan" (CDPM Lion), that proposes complex and in-depth reworkings of Reinhardt's pieces and where there is the Franco Cerri Guitar Quartet, which is the valuable result of five years teaching work.