Audiopile Review: Italian imprint Black Sweat Records unearths a gem from the depths of their home country’s vibrant but overlooked 70s jazz and fusion scene, reissuing the lone album from Folk Magic Band. With core members springing off the short-lived outfit Spirale (some of the you may recall the reissue of their lone album back in 2021 https://audiopile.ca/product/spirale/), the group carries the fiery intent of their former outfit and applies that intensity to a large ensemble brand of spiritual jazz. Conjuring the globally-inspired orchestrations and ecstatic outbursts of better known groups like The Sun Ra Arkestra or Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Folk Magic Band tear a white hot streak across the album, touching on latin and African rhythms, fiery free jazz and swinging big band crescendos. Life affirming jazz from the past for these current dark times. Huge recommendation.

Reissue, originally released in 1976. Folk Magic Band represents one of the most interesting and original, yet lesser-known experiences of the Italian jazz scene of the 1970s. In the legendary alternative environment of the Folk Studio in Rome, an open 18-members lineup is inspired by the free jazz of its time, a music that encompasses the whole world and its polychromy of sound. The echo seems to resonate the pan-ethnic motifs of Don Cherry and his Organic Music Society, but also the spiritual jazz of Pharoah Sanders and the orchestrations of the Sun Ra Arkestra. The textures chase a Chinese melody, ignite with African scents and South American jungles, flow into fusion violin drifts a la Archie Shepp’s Attic Blues or Mingus-like orchestral sections. The fascination of this collective affair still strikes for its playful and ironic nature, still impressing for its strength and willingness to open and influence new directions.