Try as we might, it is impossible to compare Raphael Gualazzi with anyone. He is ‘different’ from just about everything. He is, however, at the centre of music – of good music, that is, music that is composed and played like it should be. Especially jazz, but also all the rest, as seen through the lens of jazz and the stride piano.

Raphael Gualazzi is unique.

Raphael Gualazzi recently won absolutely everything he could win at this year’s Sanremo Giovani: winner of the contest with “Follia d’amore” , self written, produced and arranged and included in his new album “Reality andFantasy” out February 16^th, he was also awarded the critics’ award as well as the press room award.

And this is immediately clear when you listen to the tracks on the album ‘Reality and Fantasy’, which seem to have been recorded in a timeless interlude in our reality. They are so packed with style influences that to identify each one individually would be an impossibile task, yet these influences are the skeleton of one of the most surprising albums of the year. And it was not difficult to foresee that this 30-year-old with the boyish haircut, born (as he likes to repeat) “in a small town just a stone’s throw from Urbino”, would become the new revelation of Italy’s singer-songwriter scene, which is increasingly thirsty for inspiration.

“I studied in an almost philological way,with the precision that comes from passion”. Only the purest talents grow as Gualazzi has grown, struggling to find the right path, exploring many boundaries, hoarding together different passions until he was able to find that which would be his final, complete style that he would never abandon. And performing live. Everywhere, and at all costs, even making sacrifices, skipping nights, pocketing only promises and never money, investing in a zero-interest dream.

Talking with shy Raphael, therefore, who seems to weigh his answers as if they were the notes of a solo, it is clear that his musical dictionary is a collection of experiences, of sounds absorbed while studying pianoforte (after falling in love with it at the age of nine) at the Rossini Conservatory of Pesaro, then becoming engrossed in blues, the full-bloodied and desperate soul of black music, and the stride piano that so captivated Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, embracing ragtime and New Orleans blues, steeped in Africa and pain, with a lyricism that expresses the frenzy of suffering better than anything else.

Old stuff, you say? Absolutely not. It is impossible to listen to this album without feeling the vibration of Stevie Wonder. Or that of Jamiroquai. Or of Ray Charles.But just here and there, filtered by the kind of fresh and modern sensitivity that is not easy to find. Quite simply, if you look through the catalogue of 2011 music you will not come across anything newer than this album by Raphael Gualazzi. The novelty, in fact, is a new light shining out of tradition.

This light is a thirty-year-old singer/songwriter who, in December, filled one of the most famous clubs in Paris, the Sunside, performing in front of a prestigious audience, but who now, with extraordinary humility, will be taking part in the Festival of Sanremo in the Young Talents category with a track which, by all accounts, is a ‘Madness of Love’ and, while he waits to see if he has won any other prizes, he has already won one: that of courage, the only driving force of dreams that truly win in the end.

‘Reality and Fantasy' (Sugar/Universal Music Distribution) also has a European dimension, being released in France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg, countries in which Raphael will also be performing live in the main festivals during 2011.