Enrico Rava Fearless Five with Joe Lovano: Corners review

(ECM)The Italian trumpeter’s group – featuring an old friend – rip through originals and free improvisation while balancing late-Miles funk with excellent vocals and horn ballads

Miles Davis was the gamechanger behind at least three landmark transformations in jazz-making methods between the late 1940s and the 1960s – yet he was perhaps too instinctively lyrical, and too worldly, to take the freedoms he helped unleash too far from the marketplace. In 1960s Europe, a different story emerged, as African American free jazz innovations by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and others flowed into cultural traditions from Scandinavia to Spain, Soviet Russia and East Germany, inviting unions with contemporary classical and local folk music along the way.

But Miles’s unique sound remained as a key inspiration to two gifted trumpeters in Poland’s Tomasz Stańko (1942-2018) and the Italian Enrico Rava, even as they also drew on European eclecticism. Rava continues to rip through the walls of linear post-bop mazes, and use raw sound as if it were his everyday speech, just as Miles once did – as confirmed by Corners, recorded with his young Fearless Five group plus his longtime friend Joe Lovano on saxophones.

The opening Certi Angoli Segreti is a haunting old Rava original. It begins here as a wistfully graceful trumpet statement that turns to a jaunty dance prodded by Lovano’s bustling, fitfully multiphonic tenor sax, Frisellian guitar chimes from Francesco Diodati, and the warm trombone harmonies the excellent Matteo Paggi furnishes throughout the set. Drummer/vocalist Evita Polidoro’s Le Mie Gambe is a soulfully personal and cannily paced vocal from a creative newcomer whose voice and often urgently Tony Williams-reminiscent drumming is destined for distinction. The Lovano-penned Sun Rava chatters through hurtling trumpet/guitar and trumpet/trombone call-and-response dialogues; Rava’s Hitchcock at the Beach beautifully blends brass and vocals; and Lovano’s free-improvisation Tone, Shape and Colours shows how much fresh melody there can always be in chance balances of patience and restlessness.

Balancing cliffhanging late-Miles street-corner funk, sumptuous choral ensemble sounds, classic-jazz horn balladeering and free improv is a tough challenge – but this evocative set more than rises to it.

The prolific composer, bandleader and baritone saxophonist Tamar Osborn has declared: “I’ve had multiple musical lives, and I’m not setting out to write jazz, classical or Afrobeat.” What she does create, though, are increasingly fascinating crossovers between ensemble improv and tight writing from multiple genres. Varier: Berlin (Dark Circle), recorded with performers from Berlin’s new-music scene, suggests in its reeds interplay and percussion creativity, a long-term new-music project with fascinating prospects. Drummer/composer/producer Moses Boyd’s Songs for Sinners (Exodus) is an enthrallingly cinematic fusion of all the powerful sounds that matter to him: gospel and church music (central to his life), grime, soundsystem textures, soul vocals, jazz improv and more. And Bill Laurance and Michael League’s Close to Home (ACT) takes the open-minded and adventurous duo of Snarky Puppy keyboardist and bass guitarist toward new horizons of north and south American fusions, pop, jazz, blues, minimalism, and folk influences from across the globe, notably Mediterranean regions and east Asia.