Jazz
Ropeadope SUR · 25 September 2026
Twenty-two tracks, which is exactly the number of Major Arcana in the tarot, and in the same order: “Il Folle” opens as the Fool and “Il Mondo” closes as the World.
Ten cards arrive under their usual names – the Fool and the World, as above, plus the Magician, the Chariot, the Hermit, Death, the Devil, the Star, the Moon and the Sun – and the rest are renamed by the position they hold: at the fourth, where the Empress goes, there is “La Donna”; at the thirteenth, where the Hanged Man goes, “Il Sacrificio”; at the seventeenth, where the Tower goes, “Il Menhir”. Anyone who wants to follow the record with the deck in front of them will find the whole correspondence, and anyone who doesn’t know it will hear twenty-two short jazz pieces for guitar.
The core is a genuine trio: Turra on guitar, Filippo Rinaldo on keys and Stefano Grasso on drums and percussion. On top of that there is a string layer the title doesn’t announce, with Laura Safadi on viola, Angelica Pierri on violin and Pietro Procopio on double bass, so the “trio” of the title is six people across much of the programme.
The running times say where he chose to linger. “La Donna” (6:42) and “Il Sacrificio” (6:35) are the two long pieces; “La Morte” (2:10) is the shortest of all, which for card thirteen is a decision and not an oversight. “Il Sole” (2:22) and “La Luna” (2:32) pass quickly, and “Il Mondo” (5:03) closes calmly.
Eighty-six minutes across twenty-two pieces give an average of under four minutes per card, and eleven of the twenty-two tracks don’t reach three and a half minutes. The result is a sketchbook in which the material rarely has room to grow: Ropeadope itself says the record “demands complete attention”, and it demands it for an hour and a half with a form that restarts every three minutes. Heard in blocks of six or seven cards it holds up far better, and that is no compliment to the sequencing.
Twenty-two tracks and eighty-six minutes. The magazine Musica Jazz has described Turra as “a guitarist with a visceral passion, a perfect synthesis of heart and mind”.
Rating: 6.6/10
Text by Aina Torrents