Listening to Frank Pilato play and discussing with him the deeper meaning of artistic experience, the first thing that emerges clearly is his humanity. This is no minor detail, for only those capable of delving into the most hidden corners of the human condition, with its soaring heights and its abyssal depths, can hope to tell us something authentic, to inject beauty into a world increasingly parched.
In Frank and his music coexist, Nietzschean in spirit, the Dionysian fire—the chaos that fuels the creative process—and the Apollonian ability to harness it, to contain it within a form: pŷr and logos, in other words. His notes blaze with intensity, yet are supported by a rationality capable of giving them direction.
In my view, this is the deepest reason that Frank’s musical exploration remains alive and vibrant, steering clear of the sterility into which an exclusively logical approach might fall, and simultaneously avoiding the raw, unstructured instinctuality whose result would be a chaotic, shapeless mass (not to be confused with Informalism), devoid of any aesthetic interest—an outcome that, unfortunately, some proponents of certain “back-to-the-roots” tendencies romantically imagine.
Alessandro Seravalle: Composer, multi-instrumentalist and autor.