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How we met
'It was twenty years ago today', or thenabouts (sometime in late '78/early '79), dear old Stefano Cerri changed my life, or at least my location. I was doing a gig in Milan's Teatro Uomo with a percussion ensemble led by Neapolitan jazz-rocker Toni Esposito, a financially disastrous tour though fun musically and 'ethnically'. I arranged and played Fender piano with sundry effects, synth and a melodica with a pickup. The rest of the band consisted of Neapolitan Aldo Mercurio on electric bass, Greek 'Yorgo' Pentzikis on synths, and the percussionists, mainly Toni on pots 'n' pans, drums and toys with my friends Karl Potter (tumba player from Teaneck, New Jersey) and Ayhan Siçimoglu (on darabukke from Istanbul, Turkey). While I was putting away my gear after the Teatro Uomo gig, Stefano came up on stage, introduced himself, enthused about the concert and asked if I'd like to come over to his house to jam. We had a great time, having very similar tastes and formative influences (jazz-playing fathers and Beatle-saturated childhoods). Stefano was playing at the time with Crisalide, an award-winning band of top session-men based in Milan, and the keyboard player, my good friend Ernesto Vitolo, was yearning to move back down to his native Naples. When Stefano phoned me in Rome some two weeks later offering the keyboard chair I eagerly accepted, though I didn't particularly like Milan myself (I was living in Rome at the time after having spent some years on the coast near Naples in Positano).

Fabrizio De André
This isn't the plave to go into all of our adventures with Crisalide and beyond; suffice it to say that we've always been in touch over these two decades of my 'vita milanese'. When the late Fabrizio De André invited me to put together a rhythm section for his last tour ('97-'98), I called Stefano along with our old friend from Ferrara, the dean of Italian drummers, Ellade Bandini. Fabrizio had been working with the same bass player (my friend Pier Michelatti) ever since I'd organized his band in the '81 after arranging his "Indians" album, and he had never worked with Stefano, so he was understandably a bit nervous. Well let me say that in all the 80+ dates we did on the last tour, never even once did Fabrizio express to me anything but praise for Stefano's playing; I know of no other musician who won Fabrizio's trust so completely.

Fab Four-String
Now we come to the birth of the "Fab Four-String" project. In order to do the tour, Stefano was required to get himself a fretless bass, as there were a few tracks on the latest De André CD which needed one. This was against Stefano's natural bent, as he had always scrupulously avoided the fretless, considering it a sacred and taboo extension of Jaco Pastorious' genius, best left alone by others. Alas, a gig is a gig, so he ordered the fretless to start practicing on it (note for non-musicians: this kind of bass is like a violin, or, more appropriately, like a double-bass, in that having no frets makes it much harder to 'hit the right note', in other words to stay in tune). Stefano only actually received his fretless a few days before we started rehearsing, so he spent every non-eating/sleeping minute playing and getting used to it. He always took it up to his hotel room to put in a couple of hours, and it was after some days of intense 'unaccompanied' bass-playing that he started messing around with Beatle material, something he says he'd done many years before (I'll let him talk about that). On one of those first days of rehearsal, during a break, I heard him messing around with "Strawberry Fields Forever". My immediate reaction was "this is an albom"!! At first he didn't quite understand, and thought I wanted to do a Beatle album with a normal rhythm section, and, to tell the truth, it wasn't until well into the actual recording of the album that he started to accept as possible what I had felt right away was a sure bet: that music-lovers, and not only Beatle-fans, would appreciate the lush beauty of four-string electric bass interpretations of those timeless melodies and unforgettable riffs.

The bass settings are Stefano's, with my supervision (superaudition?) and a few suggestions here and there. I did the string arrangement for "For No One" and we worked out the other two together. My piano improvisations were done late one night after a grueling day's rehearsal with the Pausini band; sometimes making music, like making love, can be great when you're exhausted! Donato's vibraphone parts were perfected in the studio with a little help from the 'big white book' of Japanese Beatle transciptions. I got together with our old friend Giancarlo at his house to decide on which instruments to use for the parts I had in mind. I met Arup when he arrived in the studio and he fit right in; he liked the music so much that he took a cassette back to India to play to his ancient tabla-guru (who reportedly enjoyed it himself!). My heart-felt thanks to everybody!


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