Handmade : Emilio Solla's Tribute to Craft and it's Importance to Human Connection

 

Emilio Solla and La Inestable De Brooklyn-Handmade-Club Disco Records

The Grammy award winning, Argentina-born pianist/composer Emilio Solla and his group La Inestable De Brooklyn, releases his latest Handmade of March 13, 2026. Solla is this era’s eminent practitioner of creating modern music. He skillfully combines elements of Tango, Milonga, Latin Folk and Jazz sensibilities into its own beguiling style and Handmade delivers that in spades.

For those not up to speed on Solla’s previous work, Solla was educated in Argentina receiving his degree in Classical Piano at the National Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aires. He later received a master’s in jazz composition from the Aaron Copland School of Music in New York, eventually relocating first to Barcelona in Spain in 1996 and later to New York in 2006 where he now resides. He has worked with notable jazz musicians like Billy Hart, Paquito Rivera and Donny McCaslin and leads his own NY-based quintet Bien Sur!. Solla has been an active composer in chamber and symphonic music with such notable projects as Suite Piazzollana, a modern Tango/jazz inspired suite that is a homage to the guitar icon Astor Piazzolla. He released his 17-piece big band recording Puertos: Music from International Waters in 2019 and the album won a Latin Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album in 2020. In 2023 he received praise for his arrangements and orchestrations for his collaboration with Paquito D’Rivera titled Ritmo-The Chick Corea Symphony Tribute.  

Emilio Solla (photo credit unknown)

Handmade is a beautiful addition to this talented composer’s discography. The album is a tribute to craft, the art of working with your mind and hands. Given the rapid changes in the technologies that seem to alter almost every way we work and communicate, it is fitting that an artist like Solla recognizes that our work or our art,  a product of our creativity and hard achieved skill, is honestly realized by our own hands, our own voices, our own instruments and even in the case of dance, our feet. As such it needs to be honored and preserved to maintain the essential human connection we need to effectively communicate ideas. I believe Solla’s message here is that when technologies like robotic machines or AI can mimic our creativity and communicate soulless information or algorithmic generated art then we have lost something that we cannot afford to lose.

Solla’s La Inestable De Brooklyn, which loosely translates fittingly as The Unpredictable from Brooklyn, is made up of some top-tier musicians from NY.  The nonet includes Solla on piano; Tim Aracost on tenor saxophone , clarinet and bass clarinet; Sara Caswell is on violin; Edward Perez mans the double bass; Rogério Boccato provides drum work and percussion; Mike Fahie is on trombone; Rodolfo Zaneti is on bandoneon; David Smith plays trumpet and flugelhorn; Alejandro Avilés can be heard on soprano and alto saxophone, and flute; Facundo Colman provides percussion on track 2; and the vocal of Sofia Tosello on track 9.

Emilio Solla and La Inestable De Brooklyn

Solla opens the album with the third part of his “Suite de los Abrazo”- Bodegon Canibal or “Suite of Hugs or Embraces.”  He comments on his album notes that the three-piece suite should not be thought of as being required to be heard in a particular sequence and so he suggests that listeners might mix and match the suites. On the third suite, a gorgeous piece that demonstrates Solla’s creative use of the band’s diverse tonal basket, we hear Boccato’s drum and percussive work set the infective beat.  Armacost’s bass clarinet provides an unusual woody, tonal bass line before the remaining section adds the brass and woodwind color.  Solla’s piano adds sparse accents and Perez ‘s bass beautifully maintains the rhythm with Boccato. Avilés alto soars and then the total section creates a cacophonic but joyful canvas of color that includes inspired work by Armacost, Aviles, Smith, and Fahie. Caswell and Zanetti weave their two instruments in a particularly sympathetic way adding their tones as Solla’s arrangement swells with excitement and splendor. Wonderful.

The album continues with a homage to the compositions of Joni Mitchell. Solla starts out with a repeating piano line that is accented by Zanetti’s warm bandoneon and sweet Caswell’s violin. Solla skillfully orchestrates the instruments that he has available to him like an artist painting a picture and the results are gorgeous, but despite his reference to having referenced some of Mitchell’s compositions in this piece, I cannot tell which ones he used for the inspiration. Needless to say the man has a wellspring of imagination.

The second part of the suite” Suite do los Abrazo” is subtitled “Milonga MUtante” and is a piece that was inspired during the Covid pandemic.  Like most of Solla’s work, this piece tells a story, this one musically recreating the feel of being in an Emergency Room in the early days of the pandemic. Boccato’s drum work is evocative of the coming urgency. Solla uses the tango briefly before the group creates the hectic, frazzled and unsettling experience of being in that scary scene. Mike Fahie’s trombone provides an expressive solo, a voice that seems to be expressing his bewilder, lonely feel. The rest of the group adds to the cacophonic, unfettered frenzy of being there.

“Para el Agua” or “For the Water” was originally written as a solo piano piece by Solla. Here he arranges the music for the larger chamber group. Sara Caswell’ s violin lays out the opening lines over Boccato’s trap cadenced work and Solla’s ostinato piano work. Smith’s trumpet and Armacost’s bass clarinet and Zanetti’s bandoneon all add to the mix before Solla takes his most melodically gorgeous and harmonically inventive piano solo of the album. The arrangement bustles with tonal ideas that make this one stand out.

The final piece of the suite is subtitled “The Loss” and according to the liner notes was inspired by poetry. Solla’s piano spells out t moving ballad beautifully.  The group sets up the tension, the section swelling to evoke the coming loss. Edward Perez’s double bass offers a most facile and imaginative pizzicato solo that conjures up personal loss here. Perez is accompanied by intuitive violin work by Caswell and some emotive bandoneon work by Zanetti that sets the sorrowful mood perfectly

Solla is a master of the new tango and here he seems to be evoking the progressiveness of Miles Davis approach to music by naming this “Miles Tango.” This is not your father’s tango. Solla take the dance form and enlivens it with some of his most searching piano work on the album. The brass section wails- the rhythm section adds some funk bass and drum lines- Smith’s muted trumpet soars through the ozone. Solla creates some complex lines for the group to navigate as a unit and they do so precisely until the abrupt stop at the coda.

“Bird Song” is one of the most sonically inventive of the Solla’s songs, in no small part due to Sara Caswell’s violin eerily creating bird sounds that work so well with this composition. The music was commissioned by a chamber music ensemble from San Antonio, Texas. Solla envisioned a bird that flew easily between Mexico and Texas at the border, unencumbered by customs or immigration rules. Not only was the bird free, but this avian creature could also dance to Solla’s wonderful folk-inspired music. The group was a cornucopia of sounds weaving a magical environment- flutes, trumpets, woodwinds, piano, bandoneon- that created a splendid background for Caswell’s precocious bird. This cinematic piece is aural delight.

“La Carta” (The Letter) opens with a moving interaction between Caswell’s violin and Solla’s repeating piano lines. In the notes, Solla acknowledges that having been involved in the Ritmo project, where he orchestrated some of the great Chick Corea’s music, indelibly had an impact on his own playing. Solla confess that the piano ostinato on this one could easily have been inspired by Corea’s own “Children’s Song.” No matter what influences, here Solla’s music is a heartfelt, wordless letter that blossoms like a flower burgeoning to the warm light of the sun. The orchestration is gorgeous, as Solla blends the sounds of violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, bowed bass, and subtle percussive accents to his ringing, monotone piano lines.  After hearing this once, it’s almost impossible for the listener not to play it back multiple times to absorb the artistry of this gem of music making.

The final cut on the album is the only composition that uses voice as one of its elements. “De Viento y de Sal” or Of Wind and of Salt is perhaps the most traditional chamber music piece on the album and it features the gorgeously expressive voice of the Argentinian singer Sofia Tasello. The music is implemented by the sounds of Caswell violin and Zanetti’s wonderful Bandoneon. Tasello and the band deliver a fitting coda to this beautiful album.

Emilio Solla’s Handmade is truly an important album that revels in story-telling, marvels in astute arrangements, and embraces the listener in emotive feelings. It utilizes a band of talented and sympathetic musicians that bring the composer’s vision to life. As the composer says, the music is like a suite of a big hug or embrace!"