Jazz
Parco Della Musica Records · 24 July 2026
The title track is Benoît Delbecq’s, built out of stuttered fragments and beats that sound machined, with guitar and clarinet jabs landing off the beat and the odd piano phrase passing through. It runs two minutes twenty-six and reaches no conclusion, which on this record is not an accident.
Weave4 are Delbecq on piano, Steve Argüelles on drums, Francesco Diodati on guitar and Francesco Bigoni on tenor saxophone and clarinet. Diodati is the guitarist Enrico Rava has kept beside him for years; Delbecq’s prepared piano has been his signature for decades. La Gomma Di Dante arrives three years after the quartet’s calling card, Weave4 (Parco Della Musica Records, 2023).
Fifteen compositions in forty-nine minutes works out at an average of three and a quarter. On “Betulla”, which at four and three quarter minutes is among the longer ones, Bigoni’s clarinet traces a winding line over muted metallic percussion while guitar and electronics pull the floor out from under it. “Two Cross Spoke”, five minutes twenty-two, is the only track with time to pass through three different places.
The quartet reaches for references it never quite settles into: there is something of Bill Frisell in the way “Kind Of” gets rolling, and “Liens Cachés” has the stillness of chamber music. Nothing here intends to resolve, and the record wears that easily.
With fifteen pieces this short, several of them (“Flash” runs a minute and three quarters) are over before they have said what they are, and the quartet’s method, which is to let the music blur, needs minutes to work. The long tracks prove it; the short ones read as sketches somebody decided not to develop.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents