Marco Benevento got deep into Italian library-music composers like Alessandro Alessandroni and Piero Umiliani, the people who wrote twenty instrumentals a day for forgotten films, hunting down their records on vinyl and sitting in his car with rare CDs when he couldn’t find them anywhere else. He spent three years in his Woodstock studio writing his own versions of what he heard, and “Big Top” is the result: a Wurlitzer Centura organ, two trumpets and a tuba over a funk groove, with peacock calls and phone voice memos cut into the arrangement.
Benevento came up through the New York experimental jazz scene, made three records of purely instrumental music, then took up singing and spent the next decade pulling in every direction at once: psych, rock, Grateful Dead territory with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, session work for Clairo and Lady Wray. “Big Top” comes from Glera, out on 24 July and his debut for Big Crown Records, a record that drops the vocals and gives the instruments the whole room.
He performed “Big Top” live at Diamond Mine, the Long Island City studio co-owned by the Big Crown house band, with Leon Michels on bass, Homer Steinweiss on drums, Scott Metzger on guitar, Dave Guy and Michael Leonhart on trumpets, John Altieri on tuba.