43 – Herbarium Sonorum
43 Herbarium Sonorum
Released by nusica.org, with the support of Nuovo IMAIE, Herbarium Sonorum, the new album by the duo of saxophonist Nicola Fazzini and double bassist Giovanni Maier: eleven free improvisations, recorded in a single day in a mountain stavolo in Carnia, each named after a plant or herb.
The album will be available on all digital platforms from 18 September 2026, preceded by the single Lavandula angustifolia, due out on 6 July 2026.
Nicola Fazzini – alto saxophone
Giovanni Maier – double bass
Herbarium Sonorum: Nicola Fazzini and Giovanni Maier in eleven free improvisations for alto saxophone and double bass
Released by nusica.org, with the support of Nuovo IMAIE, Herbarium Sonorum, the new album by saxophonist Nicola Fazzini and double bassist Giovanni Maier. The 43rd release in the label’s catalogue will be available on all digital platforms from 18 September 2026, preceded by the single Lavandula angustifolia on 6 July 2026.
Eleven free improvisations, recorded in a single day in a mountain stavolo in Carnia, make up a work centred on the dialogue between alto saxophone and double bass, mutual listening and the ability of sound to generate ever-new forms. Each track is named after a plant or herb: not as a descriptive programme, but as a shared vocabulary that accompanies and reflects the way the duo’s music develops and transforms.
The project did not begin with a declared intention to make an album, but grew out of a musical friendship built through more than twenty years of occasional encounters. Fazzini and Maier had played together in a quartet several years earlier, before becoming colleagues at the “G. Tartini” Conservatory in Trieste, where they teach Jazz Composition and Jazz Double Bass and Electric Bass respectively. In 2025, their musical relationship became more continuous, leading them to explore the duo format.
A first session, recorded on the spot and released directly on Bandcamp before the encounter had taken shape as a recording project, already captures the spirit of their collaboration: not a predetermined construction, but the desire to document a rapport that arose spontaneously and was immediately recognised as fertile.
The choice of the duo format and the album title itself stem from the same underlying idea. “I favour small, even minimal line-ups: that is where I can bring out my sound most clearly, in a more rarefied, intimate setting,” says Giovanni Maier. “I am also passionate about plants and herbs, and I have always felt they were an apt metaphor for the kind of music we make: self-generating music, in which a small cell of just a few notes can develop into something highly complex, just as a seed grows into a plant. The concept was not devised in advance: it emerged afterwards, once the music had already taken root.”
The reference to the plant world belongs to a tradition running through jazz history — from Scott Joplin to Duke Ellington, nature has often provided music with a symbolic vocabulary — but in Herbarium Sonorum the botanical reference moves away from any purely evocative reading: the duo’s sound world evokes less a carefully ordered garden than a dense, unpredictable thicket in constant transformation.
The titles of the eleven tracks, too, arose from a practical need rather than from a preconceived scheme. Ahead of the recording, Fazzini and Maier decided to give each piece a title, drawing on a botanical vocabulary capable of expressing personal tastes, memories and affections: the grapevine, Vitis vinifera; emmer wheat, Triticum turgidum dicoccum; and suggestions gathered from Fazzini’s mother’s vegetable garden and the wild herbs of Carnia, such as Cicerbita alpina.
Only later, when listening back to the material, the two musicians identified subtler correspondences between certain plants and the pieces associated with them, without forcing them into a system of equivalences. More a suggestive echo than a rigorous map: the possible analogy between the climbing nature of ivy and Hedera helix, for example, never becomes a prescribed key to interpretation, but remains an open thread for the listener to follow.
The album was recorded on Friday, 24 April 2026 at Nello Schneider’s stavolo in Curiedi, near Fusea, in the province of Udine. A traditional mountain building of stone and wood, once used as a shelter for shepherds and a place for making cheese, the stavolo is now a quiet space with natural acoustics that gave the duo’s sound a tangible physical presence. The work developed far from the conventions of a traditional studio, in an environment that became an active part of the album’s character.
No advance writing, no themes fixed beforehand: the pieces emerge in the moment, with mutual listening rather than a predetermined plan guiding the process. “By nature I am a planner, but on this album I chose to let go and follow instinct more than reason,” admits Nicola Fazzini. “Certain connections, in music as in human relationships, arise for mysterious reasons: in a sense, you size each other up, and sometimes it works in a completely unexpected way.”
In keeping with this approach, the album’s track order exactly matches the sequence in which the pieces were recorded. The result is a journey that naturally alternates different atmospheres and densities, like a live concert without an audience, in which each episode also takes shape in relation to what came before.
The advance single, Lavandula angustifolia, was chosen by the duo as the track that best represents the work as a whole: a piece capable of moving through different registers and dynamics in just a few minutes, distilling the album’s wide range of colours.
Fazzini and Maier do not see Herbarium Sonorum as music reserved for specialists. The way into the album is not specialist knowledge, but curiosity and a willingness to listen: the chance to follow two musicians meeting in the open space of improvisation without relinquishing form, melody or timbral exploration.
Nicola Fazzini, Giovanni Maier
Herbarium Sonorum
Line-up
Nicola Fazzini – alto saxophone
Giovanni Maier – double bass
Track list
Cicerbita alpina
Taraxacum officinale
Sambucus nigra
Camellia sinensis
Vitis vinifera
Triticum turgidum dicoccum
Lavandula angustifolia
Hedera helix
Hypericum perforatum
Passiflora caerulea
Populus alba
All compositions by Nicola Fazzini and Giovanni Maier
Recorded Friday, 24 April 2026 at Nello Schneider’s stavolo, Curiedi, Fusea (Udine)
Recording and mixing: Michele Pegan
Cover photo: Igor Tullio
Special thanks to Nello Schneider for his hospitality.
Production
Released by nusica.org, 2026, with the support of Nuovo IMAIE
For information
www.nusica.org – info@nusica.org
Press office and communications
Giuseppe Bettiol – comunicati@giuseppebettiol.it – +39 349 1734262
Profiles
Nicola Fazzini is a saxophonist, composer and improviser active in contemporary jazz and experimental music. Originally from the Veneto region, he has developed an expressive language that interweaves jazz tradition, sonic experimentation and contemporary composition, building an extensive career in Italy and abroad. Among his projects as leader and co-leader, XY Quartet — founded with Alessandro Fedrigo and active for more than fifteen years — stands out as one of the longest-running and most visionary groups on the contemporary Italian jazz scene. His collaborators include Enrico Rava, Peter Erskine, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Miles Okazaki, Amir ElSaffar, François Houle and Nick Frazer. He has appeared on more than forty recordings, many as a leader. He is Professor of Jazz Composition at the “G. Tartini” Conservatory in Trieste, where he is also involved in curatorial work promoting contemporary jazz.
Giovanni Maier is a Friulian double bassist, composer and improviser, and one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary European jazz. Active since the 1980s, he has developed a personal language combining jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical tradition and timbral research, distinguishing himself both as a leader and in ensembles devoted to sonic experimentation, including Enrico Rava’s historic Electric Five and the Italian Instabile Orchestra. He has collaborated with musicians including Gianluigi Trovesi, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Keith and Julie Tippett, Louis Moholo, Roswell Rudd, Franco D’Andrea and Tim Berne. His work is documented on more than 250 albums as a leader or sideman, many released on Palomar, the label he founded. Over the course of his career he has taken part in major festivals and interdisciplinary projects, also working in theatre, dance and film. He is Professor of Jazz Double Bass and Electric Bass at the “G. Tartini” Conservatory in Trieste.
Herbarium Sonorum
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