Jeff Berlin – Bass

Not everything that everybody does always finds its way into the mainstream public arena and I found this recording on a relatively obscure website which contains a lot of stuff you wouldn’t hear about in the major U.K. and U.S. publications if you weren’t looking for it.

Massimo Columbo is an Italian Jazz pianist. He studied piano with Alberto Colombo and composition with Davide Anzaghi and Angelo Corradini at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan. Since 1980 he has been intensively involved with jazz.

Colombo has been working professionally as a jazz musician since 1988; he first worked with Attilio Zanchi, but quickly founded his own trio, with which he released his first album the following year. In 1992 he founded the world music band Linea C with Walter Calloni and Stefano Cerri (there are a couple of Cerri transcriptions on here). In 2005, he recorded the album Caravaggio with Mahavishnu drummer Billy Cobham and Jeff Berlin. In 2011, he founded the Inside Jazz Quartet together with Tino Tracanna, Attilio Zanchi and Tommaso Bradascio. With Peter Erskine  and Bob Mintzer, he released the album We All Love Burt Bacharach in 2016, followed by Acoustic Weather: The Music of  Weather Report (2019), with Maurizio Quintavalle on double bass and Enzo Zirilli on drums.

Whilst not widely known on the international Jazz scene. Colombo has collaborated with numerous musicians, including Paolo Fersu, Paolina Dalla Porta, Roberto Ottaviano, Enrico Rava, Gianluigi Trovesi, Flavio Boltro, Franco D’Andrea, Gianni Coscia, Barbara Casini, Mauro Pagini, Christian Meyer, Tony Scott, Tommy Campbell and Pierre Favre.  He has recorded more than 20 records as a leader. He can also be heard on albums by Attilio Zanchi, Tiziana Ghigliono and Robert Gligorov. In the field of jazz, he was involved in 29 recording sessions between 1988 and 2016, according to Tom Lord’s legendary Discography.

Colombo is one of the most prolific Italian composers; he has written about 700 compositions in various genres. His oeuvre includes numerous collections for piano and chamber music (published by Carisch and Da Vinci), as well as his Concerto for Jazz Trio and String Orchestra (op. 624) from 2009.

Colombo also taught piano and harmony at the Centro Professione Musica in Milan from 1990; since 2006 he has been teaching at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan, since 2012 as a professor. He is also Professor of Jazz Composition at the Conservatory of Como. He is the author of numerous didactic texts and a multimedia course for piano and keyboards. Since 2006 he has been the artistic director of the Bià Jazz Festival, which takes place annually in the town of Abbiategrasso.

This is a partial transcription of the tune ‘Blues For 3’ from the ‘Carravagio’ album mentioned above. It is incomplete because Jeff Berlin gets lairy in the piano solo and I can’t figure out what is he doing. It is not because it is too hard, it is just a mish-mash of octave and pedals and whatnot. Can’t decipher it! The head and the end of it are there and you will note that, whilst the changes are 12-bar, the heads are 14 bars. That’s Jazz musicians for you.