The Elephant - In The Room

In The Room is the debut album of The Elephant, an Italian trio composed of Gabriele Mitelli, Pasquale Mirra, and Cristiano Calcagnile, longstanding members of the Italian jazz community who after years of exploring the frontiers of the music together, and within a range of formations, finally decided to sit down and record some of the magic they’d been capturing in their experiments. So they locked themselves in a room and dealt with the proverbial elephant. 

Across its eight tracks the album offers explorations of the intimate personal and musical relationships between these three friends, each expressing themselves via their instrument — trumpet, vibraphone, drums as well as electronics and voice — resulting in an intimate collection of musical polaroids that reflect the expressiveness and potentiality of the music they love. The trio are joined by three guests from their global community — Italy’s Cristina Donà and Chicago’s Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek — who each lend their voice and poetic writing to the trio’s compositions. 

“We decided now or never! After a thousand vicissitudes and projects that saw us together, but never at the helm of our own shared group, we needed to collect the scattered polaroids that portrayed our friendship and put them together in an album. The only things that were truly intentional about this work were the where, the when, and the why. Once these three points were resolved and we got to the studio the music started! Our differences, intentions and perplexities merged into something that, even for us, in the beginning, was difficult to recognize and understand but constantly surprised us, intrigued us and finally bewitched us!” — The Elephant

Biography

The Elephant is an Italian trio, founded in 2017, composed of Gabriele Mitelli, Pasquale Mirra, and Cristiano Calcagnile, longstanding members of the Italian jazz community with numerous collaborations and contributions to their names. The trio first came together for an artistic residency at the Ground Music Festival (Brescia) with the filmmaker collective Unzalab where they collaborated on "Ver" a live performance of expanded cinema during which musicians and filmmakers dialogued and improvised to lead the audience on a journey through space in search of fantastic new worlds. That same year, the Elephant also participated in the Venice Biennale, within the French Pavilion as part of the opera set up by Xavier Veilhan (thanks to Enrico Bettinello). The pavilion had been transformed into a large sound box in which the band played for three days using a multitude of acoustic instruments and synthesisers. Since then, the Elephant has continued to perform across Italy as a trio alongside friends from the global jazz community such as Rob Mazurek, Jeff Parker, Alexander Hawkins, Danilo Gallo, Chad Taylor and many others. Their debut album, In The Room, will be released in early 2024 by Original Cultures, capturing some of the magic of their exploration into the frontiers of jazz.