Jazz
ECM Records · 16 October 2026
“Certi Angoli Segreti” runs eleven minutes and thirty-nine seconds and is the first thing you hear. Enrico Rava first recorded it in 1998 and it returns here with the trumpet out in front and Francesco Diodati’s guitar colouring it, until Diodati himself launches into a solo with a harsh distortion you do not expect on an ECM record. It is the longest track and it sets the terms for the rest: pieces that do not end where they seem to be heading.
The band is called Fearless Five and five musicians play on it, plus the guest. Rava, trumpet; Francesco Diodati, guitar; Matteo Paggi, trombone; Francesco Ponticelli, double bass; Evita Polidoro, drums, and she sings too. The guest is Joe Lovano, on tenor saxophone and tárogató, a Hungarian reed that is not a regular here. Lovano and Rava had already shared a record on “Roma” (ECM, 2019), taped live. Everyone writes on this one: Lovano signs “Sun Rava”, ten minutes and forty-three seconds of open possibility, and “Tone, Shape and Colours”, a free improvisation built on a riff of his; Diodati brings “Sin Peso”, a ballad with the feel of a bolero; Polidoro, “Le Mie Gambe”, in three-four, where the drummer sings.
The point of that distribution is that the record never sounds like anybody’s session date. “Le Mie Gambe” lasts three minutes and eleven seconds and is the only place where the voice is left alone out front; “Ça va sans dire” runs three twenty and goes by like a note in the margin between the free improvisation and “Bowery Dance”. When the two horns lock in unison — on “Bowery Dance”, which starts electrified and with double-stopped bass — you hear why Rava wanted Lovano and not someone else: they play the same phrase with two different kinds of hardness.
On a record where everybody brings new writing, the three pieces Rava contributes (“Certi Angoli Segreti”, “Hitchcock at the Beach” and “Bowery Dance”) are all ones he had recorded before, and they take twenty-one of the fifty-five minutes. Rava turned eighty-seven in August. What pushes the record forward is written by the others; what holds it up is him going back through his own house. Nine tracks, mixed by Stefano Amerio, with a Max Franosch cover that is a white bird and a vapour trail in a grey sky.
Rating: 8.6/10
Text by Aina Torrents