Label: ECM Records, 2021
Personnel - Enrico Rava: trumpet, flugelhorn; Francesco Bearzatti: tenor saxophone; Giovanni Guidi: piano; Francesco Diodati: guitar; Gabriele Evangelista: double bass; Enrico Morello: drums.
Enrico Rava ranks high among the contemporary trumpeters/composers of the past five decades. He has been lauded for an incredible facility to incorporate jazz tradition and avant-garde liberties in his very personal music. This new ECM outing, recorded live two years ago at the Jazz Middelheim in Antwerp with an Italian sextet of talented musicians, shows his outstanding versatility through music that forges ahead with personality and style.
Rava’s “Infant”, the most fascinating number on Edizione Speciale, develops with a manic glee, starting with rhythmic accentuation in the melody and gorgeously synced movements. The outstanding guitar dissonances heard after the theme statement are infused with bright harmonics and foreboding noise, catching the attention. The mood recalls the spontaneity of one of my favorite albums of all times - The Pilgrim and the Stars (ECM, 1975), which featured Rava alongside American guitarist John Abercrombie and the Nordic rhythm section of Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen. The squalling guitar playing of Francesco Diodati continues after Giovanni Guidi’s piano whirls, which usually crash in the lower registers with indomitable energy, and the improvisations succeed one after another, with bassist Gabriele Evangelista, saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti, and Rava, who concludes the section with a mix of angularity and feathery etherealness.
A pair of tracks combine two different tunes. One of them takes us from “Once Upon a Summertime”, originally a French ballad composed by Michel Legrand, to the medium-fast tempo that characterizes Rava’s 1996 piece “Theme For Jessica Tatum”, in which the improvisations stretch for a bit too long. The other one starts off with the very Italian melody of “Le Solite Cose”, which leads to “Diva”, a post-bop piece where Rava applies all the color and amplitude at his disposal. He repeats the feat on the popular Cuban song “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás”, during which both the group and the audience seem to have had so much fun.
Rounding out the track list, we have “Wild Dance”, which prematurely fuses melancholy nostalgia and contemplative spirituality before reaching an ambiguous, noisy nebulae in its effect-drenched sonic cosmos; and “The Fearless Five”, another old tune (first recorded in 1978 with trombonist Roswell Rudd in the lineup) that, featuring an animated trumpet/sax duel, brings into the fold elements of disparate forebears such as Andrew Hill, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie.
B+
Favorite Tracks:
01 - Infant ► 04 - The Fearless Five ► 05 - Le Solite Cose / Diva