Antonio Forcione @ RNCM, Manchester

As a prog-man, I’m used to terrible song names, but those of last night’s Italian acoustic guitarist were particular note-worthy: Spanish Breeze, Indian Café, Brasilico, Knock on Wood, Tears of Joy and so on. As you’d guess there were many different influences in his music and it was definitely an evening of ‘world-jazz fusion’ and the quartet of (from left to right) guitar, cello, double-bass and percussion would be right at home on Later with Jools Holland. But fusion’s ok right? You mix some styles together and add your own twist, what’s wrong with that? When done properly, it’s not a problem; however, Forcione would only dip his toe in each style. Rather than a subtle, tasteful, integrated fusion of styles across his work, Forcione proceeded to commit a series of rather heavy-handed pastiches, often borrowing the most obvious musical clichés only to drop them as he moved into the groove-based solo platform.

It takes years of working with something, making mistakes, and learning past the obvious before that influence will mature in you and become a genuine fusion within your musical style. It shouldn’t be a bolt-on addition to your current armoury of techniques to be picked up and dropped when necessary. The problem is that simply trying your hand at each region’s music, one at a time, will only gain you the most superficial of knowledge about it, and the unfortunate result however is that many tunes simply come across as ‘the Indian-style number’ or ‘the Spanish one’ and are rather gimicky.

Having said that, the pieces were still good enough once you got over the clichés and were aided by Forcione’s technical flamboyance getting stuffed in to every orifice. His humbleness and sense humour did him favours too in that I was under no illusions that he was portraying himself at the master of all world styles. So the gig was still very enjoyable, but I can’t shake the feeling that all the world-jazz fusion flavours and borderline over-the-top chops lost something in the mix and the result was a little vacuous and soulless. Despite Forcione pulling a ludicrous amount of extreme Jazz faces, I still could feel neither the tears nor the joy in the title track of his new CD. He’s clearly been going to many places, but I couldn’t tell where he was coming from, and for this I felt it suffered. However, this apparently doesn’t prevent him topping the Jazz charts frequently, but that says more about the noticeably middle-aged audience than it does about the musicians.

The percussionist, Adriano Adewale, deserves special mention though. Hailing from Sao Paulo, Brazil, he was surrounded by an intriguing array of percussion, and I couldn’t see for sure but I think he was sat on a cajon which he was playing with both hands and sticks. His right hand was mostly play hi-hat and snare drum with a hot-rod (a stick that’s made of about a dozen sticks of thin dowelling), but his left was playing something which I had never seen before and is best described as a large nut. Played with bare hands, this was giving him all kinds of sounds ranging from bass thuds (he had no bass drum) to high-pitch slaps. He also had a large complement of shakers, baskets, rattles, cymbals and other toys – many of which I don’t know the name for – which he played with a level of authenticity that marked him as bona fide. Texturally very interesting, the softness of this setup complemented the other instruments perfectly; a full drum kit would have likely been too aggressive and largely inappropriate and his musical contribution was certainly food for thought.