Italy's great horn

FROM the final week in April until the beginning of May, you'll be able to hear the Italian trumpet/piano duo of Enrico Rava and Stefano Bollani in British cities from London to Edinburgh and Manchester to Nottingham, so here's a review of their new duo album The Third Man (ECM CD 1737322).

Rava, who was born in Trieste in 1939, and Bollani, who was born in Milan in 1972, inspired by the supervision of ECM Records producer Manfred Eicher, have created a milestone record here, bringing together the Brazilian melodism of Jobin and the Neapolitan tradition of singer Bruno Martino with tunes by themselves, all played with technical brilliance and a visionary sense of improvisation.

Their empathy too is moving as well as astonishing, as if two instruments with such different sonic qualities are being played by one human amalgam. There is a lifetime of compelling sound blown through Rava's horn in Birth of a Butterfly and, just as you are internalising its drama, Bollani plays a chorus of notes so delicately beautiful that it is almost as if the insect's wings are fluttering across his keys.

Then Rava returns and, among his phrases, there is one bent, ascending note which stops your breath, so sudden is its grace.

In another tune by Rava, Cumpari, the trumpeter plays a fanfarish solo while the pianist comps beside him.

In the sleeve photographs, they play opposite each other with direct eye contact and their sounds are as if they are being sparked by their pupils. In Sweet Light, for example, they exchange calls and responses as if their eyes are talking to each other.

Both musicians amply express the warmth of Moacir Santos's melody Felipe, but it is in the two versions of Jobim's Retrato Em Branco Y Preto entirely transformed from its Brazilian provenances that the duo shows its unique jazz artistry, with each successive separate improvisation the cue for a comradely extension of jointly conceived ideas.

And, finally, there is the title track itself, The Third Man being Eicher, whose creative presence wafts all through the album. It has a ghostly aura, like music curling from an empty building with a spectral dialogue from the two musicians sealing a memorable album. So, go and hear them.

Rava plays with his Quintet on another new ECM album, The Words and the Days (ECM CD 1709773), his front-line partner being trombonist Gianluca Petrella, with the Genoa-born pianist Andrea Pozzo, Rosario Bonaccorso on bass and Rava's long-time confrere Roberto Gatto on drums.

Of the 12 tunes, Rava wrote eight of them, with Bonaccorso and Gatto responsible for one each. The elegiac sound of the title tune and Rava's lucid beauty as the lone horn intensifies in Secrets while his trumpet soars, moans, howls and hurries before Bonaccorso's springing bass bounces through the ears and Pozzo's stream of notes flows past.

You wonder if Rava had any in particular of Ellington's trumpeters in mind when he wrote Echoes of Duke. Cootie Williams? Ray Nance? Rex Stewart? Petrella dons his mute, perhaps for an echo of Tricky Sam Nanton, and then it is Rava, with his range, note perfection and pitch variation perhaps closest to Clark Terry, but definitely all his own horn.

Tutu has a slow grandeur, with Rava striking some spectacularly high phrases. Sogni Proibiti is all Bonaccorso's luscious bass and Serpent has bass and drums duetting ominously before Rava enters, picking his notes spaciously. Petrella's growls turn to cream while Pozzo's notes writhe on the earth.

Rava's version of Don Cherry's Art Deco becomes a brass conversation with both Petrella and Rava anything but taciturn, while the playful Traps sets free the humour in the band, as they laugh at each other and perhaps at their listeners too.

Altogether, another outstanding album by Rava, Italy's precious horn.