Search - Tommaso-Rava Quartet :: La Dolce Vita

Revelatory cinematic jazz from sunny Italy

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 07/08/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This session, a quick tour through some of the most famous themes in Italian cinema, with a couple originals in the same mode by band members, features mostly ballads, with a few very attractive mid-tempo numbers thrown in for good measure ("Cinema Moderno," parts of "La Dolce Vita"--which they take in a rather out direction, almost sounding like one of those wacko Dutch bands--and "Cronica Familiare," another tune given a rather wooly treatment). Of the ballads, many will be immediately familiar, especially to aficionados of Italian cinema: "Profuma di Donna," "Mondo Cane," "Il Postino," the title track, and "L'Avventura." What they do with them is something else. Although most come wrapped in a burnished romantic sheen, there's plenty of spine in the band's renditions; this is about as far as you can get from cocktail jazz or jazz lite as you can get and still be in an adjacent musical area code. For one thing, each of these players (Giovanni Tommaso, bass; Enrico Rava, trumpet and flugelhorn; Stefano Bollani, piano; and Roberto Gatto, drums) is a highly respected participant in the extensive Italian jazz scene, with Rava and Gatto in particular having international reputations. Thus, they bring an authentic, if slightly idiosyncratic, jazz sensibility to these proceedings. You'll find, for example, some remarkable arco stylings by Tommaso (e.g., his intro to "Il Prato"), and a startlingly sophisticated solo in the same piece from Bollani.



Indeed, "Il Prato" by Ennio Morricone, parts of which resonate eerily with that old Dylan tune, "With God on Our Side," and which, appropriately, devolves into a march near the end of the piece, makes the strongest impression. "La Dolce Vita," which they pretty much deconstruct and put back together again, also lingers with the listener. But it's all good. In fact, when I'm in certain wistful moods, this music comes about as close as possible to scratching my aural/emotional itch.



Interested buyers should be aware that this is the first stateside release (in June of 2005) of a disc that originally came out in Europe in 2000 and had only previously been available as an import. Not that that's particularly important, but it does situate Rava and bandmates in a slightly different place than if it had been recorded and released within the past year.



More exceptional music from CamJazz."