Italian jazz duo B.I.T. (Back In Time), saxophonist Danielle Di Majo, and pianist Manuela Pasqui, step boldly into history with their new album “R-Esistenze,” released April 25, 2025, via Filibusta Records. Anchored to Italy’s Liberation Day and the 80th anniversary of the Italian Resistance, this emotionally rich project transforms memory into melody, spotlighting the voices of women who shaped Italy’s intellectual and civic identity across the 1920s–1950s. It’s an intimate conversation with the past, spoken through sax and piano.
Recorded at Entrophya Studio in Spello, the sound is pristine yet raw. The duo’s interplay, refined over six years and a trilogy of acclaimed releases, feels like two minds breathing in unison, always leaving space for vulnerability, silence, and improvisational tension.
The album opens with “L’identità perduta,” where gentle piano motifs soon give way to winding, searching sax phrases. Then—chills—archival wartime audio breaks through with the distant rumble of bombs, chatter, and a city holding its breath. One way to interpret it would be that history isn’t just background, because it interrupts the music the way trauma interrupts memory.
Later, “Sul fil di lama” turns Montale’s poetry into a moody, slow, and contemplative sound. The piano circles patiently while the sax sings like a wary heartbeat, capturing the fragile edge between joy and fear. In “Cinque pezzi di luna,” Pasqui’s writing feels nocturnal and haunting, like walking beneath a fractured moon, a symbolic nod to women reclaiming their narrative.
Elsewhere, Sicilian heat and nostalgia glow in “Bagheria,” and hope rises in “Lipari,” a tribute to escaped exiles envisioning freedom beyond the shoreline. The closing track, “Luce di mezzanotte,” comes up like a rising sun, as piano glides in warm, resonant waves, sax trailing its thawing warmth, as if history finally exhales.
“R-Esistenze” is a musical manifesto, where liberation becomes harmony, and remembering becomes resistance. A profoundly elegant work of cultural and emotional restoration, it proves that sound can carry stories no textbook ever could.
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Review by: Naomi Joan