Signori Mina

The idea of bringing together Eastern European folk dances and tango nuevo is a sound one. Astor Piazzolla, tango nuevo’s founding father, surely heard similar folk dances as a kid growing up in New York City’s East Village, and one can discern their echoes – however faint – in his music. On this brief programme, violinist Zachary Carrettin and pianist Mina Gajic´ interweave a set of Seven Balkan Dances for solo piano by Serbian composer Marko Tajčević (1900 84) with a half-dozen contemporary takes on tango nuevo by Ray Granlund (b1975).

Italian songbook é un progetto discografico che inizia adesso per declinarsi in altri album nel tempo. Un album doppio diviso in due parti che nasce con l'intento di raccogliere le più belle interpretazioni di Mina in italiano. Non solo i suoi grandi successi di una carriera lunga e straordinaria che continua ancora oggi, ma anche le cover fatte da Mina dei grandi pezzi di autori e cantautori come della tradizione della musica italiana. Un Canzoniere con le più belle canzoni che tutti conosciamo con alcune perle da riscoprire prese dalla vasta produzione discografica di Mina. Una canzona inedita per ogni album e delle fotografie inedite arricchiscono le prime due uscite di questo progetto.

Since she discovered jazz singing and began recording in the mid-90s, French-Beninese singer Mina Agossi has been on an upward trajectory, each album moving on from the one before. She started out accompanied by double bass, and then progressed to bass and drums. To soften that combo’s starkness, on recent albums she has added guest musicians on percussion, trumpet and synthesiser. On Just Like a Lady, her ninth album, Agossi includes harmony instruments for the first time, adding steel pans, keyboards and guitar. From the opening notes of Phil Reptil’s acoustic guitar intro to Agossi’s own There’s a Lull in my Life, these instruments give the band a fuller, more varied sound…

How do we even measure time? It is sometimes said that time is as old as humankind, but of course it isn’t. It’s just something we created out of a need for… what exactly? Earliest known evidence suggests we were measuring time already 5000 years ago. That way we could create predictability, for example concerning planting and harvesting. From there on we could more easily schedule and organize, which then helped us building a more sustainable life. When we had found a mutual understanding of what we would call time then other systems could be developed, kind of like a third-party software. Music notation works as a fine example.

Altar Records is happy to release Mina's debut chillout album. Mina became a mom lately, so it was a natural step for her to start to make a full length album that relax the senses and fill up the space around her with peace, harmony and stillness. Being also a producer and singer, surrounded by a Serbian family of well-known musicians (Bojan her husband as Ascent, Branko her brother-in-law as Argus and of course Gradimir, her father-in-law as Norma Project), she has the privilege to do a lot of collaborations and to craft a lot of amazing electronic music at the family studios. So today Mina is inviting us into her own world of light and revelations.

This recording is a reflection of several performances that took place over time and in varying acoustic environments, including collaborations with contemporary and aerial/vertical dance. The Cage works tend to be binary in form, and while meditatively free flowing in spirit, the architecture is clean and easily understood.

12 (American Song Book) is an album by Italian singer Mina, released in 2012. In the album, Mina covers 12 standards of American music, originally published between 1930 ("Just a Gigolo") and 1970 ("Fire and Rain"). Among the others, she sings "Everything Happens to Me" for the third time (previously recorded in 1964 for the album Mina and in 1993 for Lochness) and "Love Me Tender" for the second time (previously covered for the 1991 album Caterpillar).