Trumpet and cornet and music divine

Everyone in the full house that enjoyed the Chris Botti: Live in Manila! concert last Tuesday at Resorts World Manila’s Newport Performing Arts Theater came away sated with excellent music — in all of its possible permutations at that. 

At exactly 9:37 p.m. the top-selling American instrumental artist and the world’s No. 1 trumpeter started on his third number, for which alone I was there — for the sweet pain of music.

It was one of his fave pieces, Emmanuelle, composed by Michel Colombier, with its achingly haunting melody that comes vertiginously close to emo edge, but draws back in time to escape sappy “senti.”

Ha ha. Not exactly best enjoyed alone, but I’ll take it anytime, especially from among what must be a hundred compositions (and movies and porn flicks) entitled Emmanuelle.

Last November, when Chris Botti first performed live in Manila as a featured artist for Radio High’s 105.9’s official launch, ladies swooned all over Greenbelt 5’s Fashion Walk under a tent when the Grammy winner played the same number, in a duet with violinist Aurica Luca.

Someone knowledgeable said then that the version was excellent, but still a shade under the live recording that went into Botti’s album “Live in Boston” (2008), wherein the violinist was another lady, Lucia Micarelli.

Last week, again it was Aurica who essayed the rapturous tune for a rapt audience. And I must say there didn’t seem to be much of a difference from the album version; in fact this one sounded better, and was more gratifying since one could actually feast one’s eyes (and other senses, including the paranormal) on the sight of Botti and Luca stretching and spinning the magic together onstage.

I hope no filmmaker has yet used Colombier’s Emmanuelle or ever will, so that it doesn’t suffer the same fate as, say, equally haunting Albinoni’s Adagio, which was ruined for my aural memory when it became the theme music for the award-winning film Gallipoli.

Sometimes we have to be selfish with our choices for associative music, especially since memories are often beholden to what was initially in attendance, even just as ambient augmentation. 

There are pieces of music of course that are introduced to us through film, such as Nino Rota’s masterpieces for 8 1/2 and The Godfather, or Ennio Morricone’s main themes for The Mission and Cinema Paradiso. But when we hear fine music for the first time and are enraptured by it, we want to preserve the memory of that initiation.

Well, I wouldn’t have minded if Botti had played the theme from The Mission while I replayed Robert De Niro’s slo-mo fall as a swashbuckler in the movie. Or if Botti had also blown us all away with Cinema Paradiso, as I seem to recall he did last November.

But fresh concert equals laudably new repertoire, and in fact new band members, all musicians of the first water: Billy Kilson on drums, Leonardo Amuedo on guitar, Geoff Keezer on piano, Richie Goods on bass, Andy Ezrin on keys, and as special performers, Aurica Duca on violin and Lisa Fischer on vocals.

The opening number was Venice, the second a superbly rearranged When I Fall In Love, featuring a piano solo by Geoff Keezer.  

With Aurica, Chris also played Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor as the fourth number, but not before explaining that his band has often performed in Poland, in fact been invited there 13 times over the last eight years, and that for the last invitation, he was asked to render this classical piece.

The next two numbers paid tribute to Miles Davis: Flamenco Sketches, with a pulsating electric bass solo from bassist Richie Goods in a give-and-take with drummer Billy Kilson (whom Botti intro-ed by way of quoting Sting as having paid the compliment: “The most bad-ass drummer in the world!”); and Concerto de Aranjuez / Sketches of Spain (included in Botti’s latest album, “Impressions”), featuring bad-ass riffs from guitarist Leonardo Amuedo.

Then Botti and Amuedo surprised and got me so hooked in lament again with You Are Not Alone by R. Kelly, popularized by Michael Jackson. And this time memory harked back to our own tribute to MJ when he passed away, and we played the song in our poetry class in Ateneo, while telling our listeners how its catchy beat depended upon lines that were of iambic trimeter.

The next numbers had Botti re-introducing the fantastic diva Lisa Fisher to Manila — which she paid tribute to by saying “You guys have a beautiful spirit here!”). Like the last time out, they did I Loves You, Porgy and The Look of Love. Then came The Very Thought of You, with trumpeter and vocalist performing amidst the audience, while guitarist Amuedo provided scintillating chops.

At this point Chris endeared himself even more with his Pinoy fans when he called on an 11-year-old boy who had impressed him at the workshop session conducted the day before. Praising John Phillip “JP” Sta. Ana (a cornet player who’s a scholar of Young Musicians Development Organization and a Philippine Youth Symphonic Band member) for his tonal gift, Chris said it was just right that the boy started out on the cornet, but that he would soon receive a gift of his first trumpet from the first-rate trumpeter himself.

JP did a quick solo of Carnival of Venice, delighting everyone with his precocity, then a divine duet with Botti on Italia.

Everything else was gravy: the rocking Indian Summer, with Kilson on a terrific drum solo; the showstopper of an encore as in last November, Nessun Dorma with violinist Luca and an audience member picked to help handle the climactic drum rolls; and the final encore, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, which again displayed, as our jazz-musician son wrote in his own rave review on GMA News Online, the “remarkable facet of Botti’s artistry… (—) his ability to play ballads on a very high level, avoiding the pitfalls of both arch sentimentality and brusque bebop change-running.”

Indeed, it was a splendid music concert to remember — the way Chris Botti the trumpeter also masterfully led a team of selfless virtuosos into synergy of the highest order, while fusing the classical with the contemporary, enhancing popular standards with bravura takes, and lifting everyone who listened into the very sphere of most grateful awe. 

 Thanks to Francis Lumen and Radio High for bringing Chris Botti back, and to Globe Telecoms and Resorts World Manila for their sponsorship of a singular night of musical artistry for the benefit of the Young Musicians Development Organization (YMDO).