Catch up on the latest reviews of Dino Govoni’s “Hiding In Plain Sight” from Jazz Square, Making A Scene, and Presto Music

Nov 9, 2021

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Tenor saxophonist Dino Govoni is best known as a longtime professor at the famous Berklee College in Boston and an excellent session musician. So on our site until now, his name has appeared as a participant in the recordings of other performers. But he also has his own leadership records. He does not often release his own albums, mainly on Whaling City Sound. And his last album, the third on this label, appeared here after a long break.

Hiding in Plain Sight was recorded in Brooklyn in January 2020 as a quintet. For this project, Dino put together an excellent team. The second brass voice in the quintet was the trumpet player Alex Sipiagin, one of the most successful representatives of the Russian jazz diaspora in the States, the place at the piano was taken by Dino’s main assistant on the project, Henry Hey, Michael Pope played the bass, and one of the most popular modern ones sat at the drums. jazz drummers Jeff “Tain” Watts.

Together they performed a program of nine songs. Dino’s greatest interest was aroused by the music of the jazz veteran Paul Nagel, who worked with Robben Ford, Bobby McFerrin, Boz Skaggs: the album included as many as four of his compositions. Hey brought two plays to the project, one each by Pope and Govoni himself. Stylistically, the music of Hiding in Plain Sight is a typical neo-pop mainstream with a stable structure of pieces, developed solo performers and a relatively regular rhythm. For those who love this direction, Hiding in Plain Sight is just perfect, given the high class of performers. For me personally, the favorite of the album was Nagel’s play Falling Ahead with its somewhat mysterious atmosphere and catchy melody. But this is already a matter of tastes.

As for Dino Govoni himself, Hiding in Plain Sight gave me an interesting observation. Today in American jazz there is a whole cohort of the most talented tenor saxophonists of Italian-American origin. And next to the giant Joe Lovano, next to Jerry Bergonzi and George Garzone (by the way, Dino’s teachers), Dino Govoni also occupies a worthy place in it.

Click here to read the full review

Click here to read the full review