Tommaso Cappellato - Pioneered [DMND001]

Label: Domanda Music 

The Italian percussionist-producer-composer Tommaso Cappellato will release his seventh album as a bandleader, Pioneered, on July 16, 2021. It was recorded during the artist’s month-long residency at the venerable Brooklyn contemporary arts space Pioneer Works, in 2018. Pioneered features contributions from a multicultural and sonically diverse cast of electronic, jazz, and experimental players whose own work and ideas about music communities naturally inform Cappellato’s.

The impressive list of contributors to Pioneered includes Shahzad Ismaily, jaimie branch, Val Jeanty, Afrikan Sciences, Michael Blake, Yusuke Yamamoto, Donato Dozzy, and others. Pioneered also marks the first release on Cappellato’s Domanda Music label, devoted to a global-minded eclecticism, rhythm, improvisation and joy.

For more about Tommaso Cappellato, Pioneered, and Domanda Music, read more extensive notes below..

We live in a time whose contemporary music escapes easy categorization, constantly blurring borders—genre, origin, identity, creative tradition—yearning for shared spirituality and freedom, yet bound by the requirements of Earthly description. While largely defined by the limitless availability of an entire century’s recordings, this music demands its definitions: pushed by technological, sonic breakthroughs, grounded in the classic conversations of rhythm and improvisation. Like other aspects of modern life, it needs to be both familiar and innovative.

In many ways, the Italian percussionist-producer-composer Tommaso Cappellato has been striving towards his own version of this music for two decades; and on Pioneered, his seventh album as a bandleader and the inaugural release on his Domanda Music label, he has begun achieving it. Pioneered was born from a global ecosystem of wild ideas, a longtime natural habitat for creative breakthroughs. Yet Cappellato’s work synthesizes elements that are marks of a distinctly modern world of a global culture, and the joys and tragedies that inform it.

Tommaso hails from Northern Italy, and began playing drums at a young age. It drove him towards a jazz studies degree at New York’s New School, where his mentors included Pharoah Sanders’ drummer Michael Carvin, and where he studied with a who’s who of improvisation giants (drummer like Billy Hart, Joe Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, and bassist such as Reggie Workman, Cecil McBee, and Buster Williams). By night, he played in the house band at the world famous Rainbow Room—with, among others, the late Harry Whitaker, pianist with Roy Ayers’ Ubiquity in the ’70s—and soaked in the city’s rap and house music. This resulted in a turn-of-the-century love affair with the sounds of the Big Apple, from hip-hop to hard bop, which, mixed with his homeland’s forever-roots, cemented the permanent multicultural aspirations of Tommaso’s music.