It is not so far away after all. A hopeful title for a record that turned out to be the end, and the last thing the real Perigeo ever made. They flew to Toronto to record it, handed the arrangements to a Canadian, and came home with an album that Italy immediately filed under disappointment: too easy, too conventional, too tired. That verdict has stuck for fifty years and it is roughly half right. The other half is that this is a band of very fine musicians making a deliberately generous record, and being punished for it.

The short version

Their fifth and last studio album, released in 1976 on RCA, seven tracks and about thirty-eight minutes. It was recorded at RCA’s studios in Toronto with a Canadian engineer, produced through an outside production company, and — this is the unusual part — arranged by Pete Pedersen, which is the first time in the band’s life that somebody outside the band shaped how it sounded. Giovanni Tommaso plays electric bass and double bass and contributes vocal interventions rather than songs; Franco D’Andrea plays keyboards; Claudio Fasoli plays saxophones; Tony Sidney plays electric and acoustic guitar; Bruno Biriaco plays drums. The opening track is credited to all five.

Toronto

Four albums in four years is a hard pace, and by 1976 all five of them knew they had done a great deal very quickly. The decision they took was to lighten the writing: less density, more directness, a way of speaking to an audience that was changing underneath them. One Italian reading of this album makes it explicitly social — that the crowd coming to the alternative scene in the mid-seventies was younger and less schooled than the one that had carried the movement since 1968, and that Perigeo, who were nothing if not good communicators, adjusted their language accordingly. Whether or not you buy that, the studio choice tells its own story. Going to Canada and hiring an arranger is what a band does when it wants to be heard somewhere bigger than Rome.

The sound

Smooth, warm, professional, and much less interested in surprising you than any Perigeo record before it. The fusion is still real — Fasoli and D’Andrea are incapable of playing badly, and Sidney has never been better recorded — but the pieces resolve where you expect them to resolve, the edges are sanded, and the improvisation is decoration rather than engine. It is a very pleasant album. That is the accusation and it is not unfair. What is unfair is the two-star treatment it usually gets: put it next to almost any other Italian jazz-rock record from 1976 and it holds its own comfortably. It only fails when you put it next to Azimut, and Azimut is a different band with the same name.

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The songs

Fata Morgana opens it, under five minutes, written by all five together and the strongest thing here — a mirage, which is a title this album has probably earned in more ways than one. Tarlumbana is the long one on side one at seven and a half. Myosotis is two and a half minutes of forget-me-not and is genuinely lovely. Take Of is short and moves. Acoustic Image is the eight-and-a-half-minute centrepiece and the place where the old Perigeo briefly comes back into the room. Terra Rossa is four minutes of red earth. And New Vienna closes at six — a sequel to Old Vienna from Genealogia, D’Andrea revisiting his own city two albums later, and the closest thing here to a farewell that knows it is one.

Reception and legacy

The critics used the words conventional, simplified and creatively tired, and they have never really taken them back; among Perigeo fans this is the ugly duckling of the catalogue and it is not close. Within a year the group was over, finishing with a last concert in Florence, and the five went into the careers they had been building the whole time — D’Andrea and Fasoli into serious jazz, Biriaco into the session world, Tommaso into everything. Tommaso later assembled a completely new line-up under the New Perigeo name, with Danilo Rea on keyboards and Agostino Marangolo, out of Goblin, on drums. It made records. It was not this. The magic that had held five very different men together for four years had gone, and it did not come back.

The verdict

For completists, and better than you have been told. Do not start here and do not judge the band on it; start with Abbiamo tutti un blues da piangere, work outwards, and arrive here last, at which point it plays as a warm, slightly sad coda rather than a failure. Play Fata Morgana and Acoustic Image. Then Azimut, four years and one lifetime earlier, to hear what these same five men sounded like when nobody knew whether any of it would work. It is not so far away after all. It was, though.

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