Jazz
Self-released · 17 April 2026
“Reginella” opens the album: a textbook Neapolitan song, here in five minutes and eight seconds of organ trio, with Kyle Koehler’s Hammond B3 carrying the theme and Carmen Intorre Jr. on drums. The other Neapolitan piece, “Come Pioveva”, comes third and runs three fifty-six: Alessandro Florio plays it almost as a ballad, on a clean guitar tone with no grit on it.
“Controra” is the dead hour after lunch, when the sun is at its worst and nothing in Italy moves, and the record keeps faith with that for three quarters of its length. The way out of the stillness is the six minutes thirty-six of “Taneda”, the funkiest cut, with Troy Roberts on sax and Florio’s guitar dirty for the first time; it shares its title with the duo album he recorded with bassist Mattia Magatelli back in 2014.
It ends on “Trouble #02”, a Stanley Turrentine blues that, by the trio’s own account, came up spontaneously in the studio.
Eight tracks and forty-one minutes, of which only three carry Florio’s name; the rest are the two Neapolitan songs, two standards (“Will You Still Be Mine” and “Born to Be Blue”, the latter with Laura Taglialatela’s vocal) and the closing Turrentine. There is no moment on the record where you need to stop what you’re doing, and that seems to be exactly the point: forty-one minutes of controra are forty-one minutes of nothing happening. It’s Florio’s first organ trio since “Roots Interchange” (2015) and his first with Koehler; he released it himself on 17 April.
Rating: 6.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents