"The "black way" is a method of engraving (also called "carbon black") dating back to the seventeenth century, made famous by Goya: substantially, the design is engraved on a blackened slab, creating gaps that will be visible as clear signs. Francesco Massaro, a regular guest with his "Bestiari" in this column, is a bit like Tarantino: in Black Manner (a CD just published by the Portuguese label Creative Sources) the "signs" emerge from a dark background, a dark silence with small glitches, noises and sound incidents of various kinds. We are on the border between "written" music (though perhaps on magnetic tape and not on paper) and more or less radical improvisation, a territory beaten only by jazz extremists and priests of contemporary research. Just to make clear the experimental and border nature of this project (presented in concert in the last edition of the festival "Urticanti"), Massaro worked on the crossing between the two practices, commissioning a piece of musicians a piece for computer or for magnetic tape on which he himself then improvised with the baritone saxophone.

The result is fascinating and at the same time disturbing, a catalog of sound gestures at the limit, sometimes even audible. The CD contains eight pieces: the first, introductory and very short, is composed by Massaro himself, who plays us on "on tiptoe". The others, of very variable length, are built for Massaro by friends and accomplices, mostly from Puglia: electronic specialists such as Francesco Scagliola, Giuseppe Pisano or Maurilio Cacciatore, or musicians closer to jazz but of reckless nature such as Adolfo La Volpe and Giorgio Distante, "amphibious" creatures like Gianni Lenoci and unpredictable sound poets like Valerio Daniele (in brackets, the work is recorded in his studio, in Monteroni). Just the latter, with La strana casa dei giardiniere, closes the path of listening, and his is perhaps the most dense piece of the lot. On the contrary, As cane in the wind of Scagliola is made of small scattered and distant shivers. In any case, here as elsewhere, Massaro "inhabits" the various sound landscapes with intelligence."-Fabrizio Versienti, Corriere del Mezzogiorno

"The music of Francesco Massaro speaks to us from a wound, or perhaps from the wound of history: the oneiric mood of Henry Threadgill freed from the cage of the structures, almost a Boulez lost in labyrinths on the border between jazz (which can only be glimpsed and really fugacissime ombre, or simply its necessary to bloom in something definitely other) and contemporary, the untiring search of Roscoe Mitchell and Evan Parker as a beacon, however, led with an inexorably light, thanks to a voice that makes his come to terms with silence in every moment its strength, its own fragility its power. [...]"-Nazim Comunale