Originally available on CDR through the Portoguese label Ruby Red Editora, this late 2007 release features 8 songs including favorites like "I Wanna Be Free" and a cover of the jazz legend Pharoah Sanders ("Love Is Everywhere"). "FMM, Vol. III" is the closing chapter of this trilogy. For this remastered digital reissue and through this special occasion of the Juneteenth 2021 celebrations, "I Wanna Be Black" has been permanently retitled as "I Wanna Be Free" (this has already happened for the "Collected Works" CD release on Porter Records though, back in 2009).

"An enfant prodige from the Italian underground, Valerio Cosi is a serious case of talent. At the age of 22, he has stood out in underground movements worldwide, thanks largely to the way he musically applies his interest in various music (jazz, Indian ragas, krautrock). This album, released by Ruby Red, label run by Tiago Miranda of the Portuguese band Os Loosers (with whom he will go on a European tour in January), is a lesson in how a truly exciting music can be born from the marriage of different languages, aware of its origins, but so much personal that it's unique. Valerio's approach to the saxophone (his main instrument) is almost always melodic, in line with Eric Dolphy or Pharoah Sanders - an example of this is the wonderful "Love Is Everywhere", with layers of saxophone and a piano in harmonious union. A mix of Africa, jazz and psychedelic ramblings, 'Freedom Meditation Music, Vol. III' has a creative glow that invites you to follow the path of the Italian boy". (Pedro Rios)

"Huge apologies for last week's unexplained absence; won't happen again. Been wrapping my head lately around this new album–the first I've heard–by Italian multi-instrumental improviser Valerio Cosi, on the always intriguing Ruby Red label. It's called, kinda blandly, Freedom Meditation Music Vol. III, and it seems to be rooted in pretty open, spacious free jazz. In fact, on a couple tracks that's all it is, but a bunch of others are these weird amalgams of jazz and noise, and sometimes it's not even amalgams, just straight hard cuts from a snappy bit of horn/drum swing to a blinding storm of intense howl. The best stuff is a little smoother than that, melting bits of semi-modality into flattened stretches of drone. But even those spots have this weird kind of incongruity, an odd sense that these things just shouldn't be put together, that I really dig. Maybe it's not so much shouldn't as usually aren't, which is kinda refreshing - even my fave recs of late don't offer anything so intriguingly off...
I think this partially comes from the fact that Cosi made this rec by cutting and pasting together different recordings, so naturally there's gonna be some noticeable juxtapositions and strange turns of sonic phrase. But lots of people do that, so who knows...Maybe it's just not that weird–it is, after all, just jazz mixed with noise–and instead I could just be losing my mind. But after having witnessed about 1000 free jazz shows and probably as many noise ones, I can't say I remember seeing/hearing/caring about anything that sounded quite like this. I've certainly never heard anyone called jazz get noisy in quite this way–even my favorite all-out free jazz terrors keep their noise in the context of acoustic improv, rather than electric bombast (please give me some counterexamples, cause–besides Hat City Intuitive, who do things in a way similar to Cosi but don't sound a bit like him–I can't think of any, and I think that's gotta be more due to my mushy mind than any reality going on here...).
Anyway, while I retreat to my rubber room, I'm gonna leave ya with two examples of Cosi's brilliance, since I owe ya from last week. These are two of the most extreme cases of his jazz/noise yin/yang (the opening track, "Little Hymns to the African Story: i) Chumbani Mule," is more of a true seamless hybrid), with "I Wanna Be Black" (not a Lou Reed cover) offering bouncy jazz interrupted by a car crash, and the even more absurd "You Can't Pretend to Be Someone" chopping Lounge Lizard Heaven into electronic Hades and then some kind of sample-skipping Limbo. Enjoy, and I'll be back with my full brain next week..." (Marc Masters - Noiseweek/Pitchfork)

"The record presented here is the third and final installment of Valerio Cosi’s Freedom Meditation Series, one of the many ventures Valerio has been participating in in recent times.
Contrary to the collective movements of new and younger generations working with the jazz lexicon in the saxophone, Cosi does not focus on the more extreme free manifestations as put to tape by Kaoru Abe, Albert Ayler or Peter Broetzmann. Though obviously informed by that vocabulary (and using it too, but in other projects), his wonderful horn playing here seems more connected with the heroic, more traditionally melodic phrasing of Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders - that realm of tone, that grandiouseness (and at 22!!).
But even though he already is an accomplished jazz player, everything else on the record seems even more bordering on the positively ridiculous. Playing all the instruments (from several electronics, sax overdubs, keyboards & what have you) apart from the drums – his regular collaborator Enzo Franchini is responsible for that -, Cosi has meticulously thought out & orchestrated everything on this record. Utilizing various recordings from several settings, he’s cut up and pasted them up in his own skewed and purposeful compositional logic. The agglomeration of idioms and genres he touches base with is immense. Coming from what he describes as a devotion of “jazz, improvisation, ultrapsychedelia and kraut rennaisance”, his love for many forms of marginal &/or universal expression totally shines through with knowledge & fire, using everything from raga/drone sound beds as platform for some heavy duty horn lyricism, to some old good vibed chanting, to some straight up spaced out synth jamming.
CD-R comes with hard case digipack with Valerio’s artwork. Some of the first public giant steps from one of Europe’s new generation finest free thinking, free feeling, true originals." (Pedro Gomes)