Enrico Rava | Edizione Especiale | Available October 29 via ECM

Trumpeter Enrico Rava's

Musical Enthusiasm Returns With

New Live Recording Edizione Speciale

Quartet Features Francesco Diodati,

Gabriele Evangelista, and Enrico Morello

Available October 29 via ECM

Enrico Rava delivers a characteristically outgoing performance in this live recording from Antwerp’s Jazz Middelheim festival. In the summer of 2019, the doyen of Italian jazz was in buoyant mood as he zigzagged between celebrations marking ECM’s 50th anniversary and his own 80th. For these concerts, the core of his current quartet with guitarist Francesco Diodati, bassist Gabriele Evangelista and drummer Enrico Morello was augmented with guests to form a special unit, an Edizione Speciale able to rove across the totality of Enrico’s musical enthusiasms. To differing degree, all the players heard here have been inspired by Enrico Rava’s example: he has been a mentor to most of them and, in turn, draws fresh energy from their spirited interaction. “I give them a lot of freedom,” he has said of his sidemen, “because I trust them. I have to trust them, and they have to trust me – at that point, everything is possible.”

 

Always a special case among the improvisers, Rava (born in Trieste in 1939) stood out in the late 1960 and early 1970s era of the new music, as a tradition-conscious player in the inner circle of the free blowers. This is apparent on some of his earliest recorded appearances - with Steve Lacy on The Forest and the Zoo, for instance, or with Manfred Schoof on European Echoes or with Carla Bley in the massed ranks of Escalator Over the Hill.

 

“I always felt connected to the tradition of jazz, and started to discover a more ‘Italian’ way of feeling the music which to me means giving greater importance to the melody”, Rava explained in the book Horizons Touched. The trumpeter/flugelhornist gradually dove deeper into his “personal musical world, which represents a synthesis of the many experiences of my life.” This meant jazz from New Orleans to Ornette Coleman and beyond, influences from Italian classical and popular music, and also “the feeling of South America, in a way my second home, with tango and Brazilian music…I’m putting all the musics that I love together making something that is still essentially jazz but also unmistakably my music.” 

 

The repertoire of Edizione Speciale expresses this autobiographical flavour from the first moment. “Infant” begins with briefly unaccompanied Rava flugelhorn, soon to introduce a theme that moves initially like one of Ornette’s themes for his early group with Don Cherry, as saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti plays tight unisons with Enrico. The entry of guitarist Gabrieli Evangelisti subverts the association in an explosion of sound-colour and by the time Giovanni Guidi, one of Rava’s most gifted protégés, arrives with a boiling piano solo the feeling is established that this music, brimming over with personality, can go anywhere, swinging with insouciant recklessness from mood to mood.

Michel Legrand’s “Once Upon A Summertime” is gradually untethered from associations with the Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaboration on Quiet Nights, with poetic and limpid Guidi piano easing the ballad into freer areas which coalesce into Rava’s “Theme for Jessica Tatum” from his Noir collection of darkly cinematic tunes. 

 

“Wild Dance”, title track of the Rava Quartet’s 2015 album, proposes balletic movement over a floating pulse with flugelhorn juxtaposed against distorted electric guitar texture, which Rava refers to as “clouds of sounds.” “The Fearless Five”, meanwhile, takes us back to the heyday of Enrico’s group with the late Roswell Rudd, with roots in Dixieland and the lurching rhythms of Thelonious Monk, while always reaching for other freedoms. 

 

“Le Solite Cose/Diva” brackets a piece that was a favourite of Enrico’s duo with Stefano Bollani together with another noir-ish portrait, which Rava has returned to on several occasions (including Wild Dance). And finally, there is a carnival-spirited account of the popular Cuban tune “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás”. (Guidi has recorded it previously for ECM on his own album This Is The Day). Rava’s Edizione Speciale ensemble uses its syncopated groove as a launching pad for cheery solos from each of the band members. Enrico Morello, whom Rava hails as “the best drummer in Italy right now”, elegantly negotiates the shifting Latin rhythms.

Enrico Rava made his earliest ECM recordings on The Pilgrim And The Stars (1975) and The Plot (1976), with his international quartet with John Abercrombie, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen. Since then he has been heard in many other contexts including, recently, the album Roma, with a quintet co-led by Joe Lovano and also featuring Giovanni Guidi, Dezron Douglas and Gerald Cleaver (recorded 2018). Edizione Speciale is Enrico Rava’s 18th recording for ECM.  Further recordings are in preparation. 

1 INFANT 13:01

2 ONCE UPON A SUMMERTIME / THEME FOR JESSICA 16:58

3 WILD DANCE 06:17

4 THE FEARLESS FIVE 12:57

5 LE SOLITE COSE / DIVA 09:43

6 QUIZÁS, QUIZÁS, QUIZÁS 05:24

Enrico Rava   Trumpet & Flugelhorn

Francesco Bearzatti   tenor saxophone

Francesco Diodati   Guitar

Giovanni Guidi   Piano

Gabriele Evangelista   Double Bass

Enrico Morello   Drums

PREORDER

CONCERTS

November 01 Enrico Rava Elbphilharmonie, kleiner Saal Hamburg Germany

Drive! - Drive! (AUAND RECORDS 2018)

Solid connections, caustic sounds

and meticulous post-production

on the road to Drive!

Auand Records releases the debut album of Drive!

with Giovanni Guidi, Joe Rehmer, Federico Scettri,

and Niccolò Tramontana’s signature on sounds

Electric and sharp, Drive! (out in June under Auand Records) proudly reveals dirty, rough, and almost dismembered sounds. Most of all, this recording witnesses the lively exchange started several years ago among three musicians: Giovanni Guidi (Fender Rhodes, keyboards), Joe Rehmer (double bass, electric bass) and Federico Scettri (drums), joined by Niccolò Tramontana’s touch on sounds. 

«This band’s main feature is a complete role equality – Guidi, now actively involved in a new adventure with Auand after his successful ECM albums, says –. No instrument prevails. If I listen to the music we’ve recorded, I can clearly hear the product of everyone’s inclinations.» «This project was born a couple years ago – Federico Scettri adds – We had met each other in several other bands, and this has allowed us to find a good chemistry. We have played very much and very often, which is quite unusual nowadays. Our approach has immediately been spontaneous – we barely talked, but we were always pleased by the final result. Plus, Tramontana’s work is very interesting.»

The inner engine of Drive!, Niccolò Tramontana has been assisting the whole process since the beginning, playing various roles, and helping to give the recording its final shape: «He was with us both in the studio and in post-production – Scettri tells – He managed to edit and mix very different sections, thus creating a steady balance between acoustic and electric, as well as synth sounds and electronics.»

Far from being just the picture of a trio, Drive! is something more complex and unusual, with a rich pre and post-production, as shown by ‘Serpentine Method’, a track that invites the listener to step in a labyrinth of percussion, keyboard lines, synth sounds and voices reflected in a mirror.

01 High Voltage

02 Pyramid

03 Upright Spiral

04 Don't be a Square

05 The Fire Swamp

06 Scorpions

07 Serpentine Method

08 Moonraker

09 Nocturne

10 Blue Dream

11 Wheelhouse

Giovanni Guidi fender rhodes, keyboards

Joe Rehmer double bass, electric bass

Federico Scettri drums

Produced by Drive!

Executive Producer: Marco Valente

Recorded at Marchiselli, Foligno (PG) – Italy

Engineer: Niccolò Tramontana

Cover Photo: Michele Palazzo

Official Facebook Page

Giovanni Guidi, Gianluca Petrella, Louis Sclavis, Gerald Cleaver - Ida Lupino (2016) ECM RECORDS

Ida Lupino is a fresh and creative album, distinguished by deep listening and focused interaction. At its centre is the remarkable improvisational rapport of two Italian musicians – pianist Giovanni Guidi and trombonist Gianluca Petrella. Their musical understanding – already apparent to listeners who heard them in Enrico Rava’s band – has been further refined in a widely-travelled duo which seeks encounters with fellow improvisers. “Our duo work is really defined by our collaboration with other artists,” Guidi says. The present album both builds on established relationships and the stimulus of new encounters as they are joined by – in Petrella’s words – “two masters of contemporary jazz who are really on our wavelength”.

For this recording, Manfred Eicher brought Guidi and Petrella together with US drummer Gerald Cleaver and French clarinettist Louis Sclavis, for a set of music by turns introspective and outgoing. The Italians had played previously with Cleaver, on an early Guidi album called We Don’t Live Here Anymore, but Sclavis had never met the other musicians prior to the session at Lugano’s Stelio Molo RSI auditorium. “It’s very precious this kind of musical relationship,” Louis Sclavis says, “on the one hand, it’s very fragile but at the same time there is a strong connection between the players. We are four people for one music, and we don’t know where we’re going, but we control the journey.”

“In this album we are searching for many different things,” says Giovanni Guidi. “Improvised music has to be very democratic. At the same time, one of its components should be a sense of wonder. And the more you have a strong idea, at the concept level, the more you know you must not impose it…”

Gerald Cleaver: “I liked the completely open way Giovanni and Gianluca approached this: not telling me what they wanted, but having some sort of underlying plan, and what I had to do was basically surrender to it. That could have been difficult, but it ended up being a really enjoyable ride.”

The emphasis is on lyrical group improvising and tunes by the players, created in the moment or otherwise. There are a couple of exceptions: “Per i morti di Reggio Emilia (To the Dead of Reggio Emilia)” is a protest song penned by Turin folk singer-songwriter Fausto Amodei. And the title track, “Ida Lupino” , does double duty as a salute to composer Carla Bley in her 80th year (Petrella once played in a big band under Carla’s direction) and as a tribute to the late, great Paul Bley, who popularized the tune and influenced so many improvisers – not least Giovanni Guidi

“I find the music we played to be above all very sincere,” says Guidi. “It is an exact photograph of where our individual journeys have brought us, and what we were able to create together. And it wouldn’t have been possible without Manfred, who is in a way the fifth musician – hearing every note, every sound, every detail…” The album was recorded and mixed in three days, in time-honoured ECM tradition. “When we listen to what we’ve played, we’re left a little speechless, because there are so many subtleties that transform the whole quality of the music.”

Guidi, born in Foligno, was encouraged in his musical directions by Enrico Rava at summer master classes in Siena, and subsequently played on the Rava albums On The Dance Floor and Tribe. His previous ECM albums include City of Broken Dreams and This is the Day, featuring his trio with Thomas Morgan and João Lobo. Gianluca Petrella, born in Bari, plays on four ECM albums with Enrico Rava: Easy Living, The Words and the Days, Tribe and Wild Dance. The two of them, Guidi and Petrella, are frequently instanced by critics as key figures in a new “golden age” for Italian jazz.

Louis Sclavis, from Lyon, has made ten albums as a leader for ECM since 1993, the most recent being Silk and Salt Melodies and Sources, released respectively in 2014 and 2012. Where previous recordings have stressed his originality as conceptualist and jazz composer, Ida Lupino emphasizes his capacity as quick-thinking melodic improviser.

Detroit-born Gerald Cleaver, one of the very finest drummers of the present moment, made his ECM debut in 1997 as a member of Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory on Nine To Get Ready and has since appeared on the label as a member of Tomasz Stanko’s New York Quartet, the Michael Formanek Quartet and the Craig Taborn Trio. The most recent release featuring Cleaver is Miroslav Vitous’s Music of Weather Report.

01. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

02. Just Tell Me Who It Was

03. Jeronimo

04. Ida Lupino

05. Per i morti di Reggio Amilia

06. Gato!

07. La Terra

08. No More Calypso?

09. Rouge Lust

10. Things We Never Planned

11. Fidel Slow

12. Hard Walk

13. Zweig

14. The Gam Scorpions

Giovanni Guidi: piano

Gianluca Petrella: trombone

Louis Sclavis: clarinet, bass clarinet

Gerald Cleaver: drums