It's less of a shock more of a diverting surprise to hear Enrico Rava, 85 on 20 August - so definitive in recent years on such albums as The Song Is You with Fred Hersch or with Matthew Herbert and Giovanni Guidi playing live on For Mario - on a label that isn't ECM.
It's even more of a jolt to find the Italian avant-garde poet of the trumpet and flugel with players we aren't really that familiar with - plucked from the younger generations of adventurous Italian jazzdom: trombonist Matteo Paggi, guitarist Francesco Diodati, long since a collaborator, bassist Francesco Ponticelli and drummer Evita Polidoro joining him to make up the group. Polidoro sings ethereally as a bonus on 'Amnesia.'
Highlights include the Rava and Paggi duelling on 'Le Solite Cose'. Playing tunes all credited to Rava, there's certainly a light joyous quality in the less tensile moments. But a Rava album wouldn't be a Rava album without the bluesy smeary Stańko-like squalls and edge-of-a-cliff tension hinted at now and again from his younger wilder days that is yin to the yang of the more contented passages.
The album takes its name from a tune (although it's not here) of Rava's from the 1970s - the Italian recording it with US avant trombone icon Roswell Rudd, Jean-François Jenny-Clark and Aldo Romano, a piece he also recorded with Gianluigi Trovesi and in a live version on 2021's Edizione Speciale - a recording that also featured guitarist Diodati heard here with him.
Bassist Francesco Ponticelli's intro to 'Spider Blues' is a moment of balm and the album - recorded at the Casa del Jazz in Rome over a couple days of late-February this year - provides quite a few of these and also is a potent reminder of one of the most magnetic playing personalities on the Eurojazz scene of the last 50 years and more.
Gentle and loose, there's a lot to love here. The tender and plangent 'Lady Orlando' is the track we gravitated to most.
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