DOWNBEAT RAVA
NOTE: Downbeat asked for an 1800-word piece, paying $350. They cut it to 1000 words and paid $200. Consider that next time you read that magazine ...
Enrico Rava’s smile at once reveals key facets of his personality: the serene cosmopolitanism, the sly knowingness of an enthusiast about to let you in on a secret and, of course, the indomitably sexy Italian charm. It is the smile with which he greets admirers at the Montreal international Jazz Festival – where the short man with the stylish silver mane and drooping mustache is casually known as “le grand Enrico” – and it is the smile, coupled with a shrug, he leans on when asked why this 66-year-old icon of Italian and European jazz does not have a higher profile in the United States.
Indeed, he’s in this most European of North American cities at the request of that most American of innovators, Pat Metheny, as part of the guitar god’s invitation series. He hailed Rava’s “amazing conception of melody and music in general,” which “instantly offered everything to my ears that I really loved to hear all in one unbelievably beautiful package.” If celebrating beauty for its own sake is a foreign concept in America, the first reverent notes of My Funny Valentine – made famous by Rava’s idols Miles Davis and Chet Baker – made it clear what the Italian’s sensuous lyric classism brings to the table, and why, as Metheny emphasized, he’s “rightfully regarded as one of the premier musicians of our time.”
If that sounds a little lofty to this “eternal fan who plays trumpet,” consider Rava’s unusual new trio record, Tati, which he describes as “mainly slow songs on the poetical side.” It follows last year’s rave return to ECM, after an 18-year absence, with his quintet’s Easy Living, which both Rava and producer Manfred Eicher considered his best record in a career spanning more than 100 sessions, over 30 as a leader. While the quintet date mirrored his group’s sleek dynamism, Tati is a stark crystallization – elegant, even austere, yet warm – of Rava’s catholic tastes. His melodic inventions are inspired by noir (Fantasm) and free jazz (Cornetology) and opera (an arrangement of Puccini’s E lucevan le stelle) and, of course, large doses of lingering balladry keynoted by the opening Gershwin tune, The Man I Love.
The inspiration for Tati’s stripped-down instrumentation – trumpet, piano, drums – was a second version of Easy Living’s title song, after Rava deemed his quintet’s original “too much like an imitation of the version Miles did with Mingus.” He was so happy with the aired-out trio format that Eicher suggested a record with Rava’s hypnotic piano protégé Stefano Bollani, with whom he’s played for a decade, and drummer Paul Motian, who he first met on his career-defining sojourn in New York in 1967, gigging with the cream of the New Thing. Rava reserves that florid Italian sobriquet “absolute master” for Motian. “He changed the history of drums just with Bill Evans and Scott Lafaro alone. Paul is one of the most sensitive people in the world – he doesn’t have to talk, he just plays.”
Rava, of course, talks volumes when it comes to the passions that were ignited in 1957, when the 17-year-old saw Miles perform in Torino and, a couple of days later, he bought a trumpet. He stocks his two homes and his car with the same core classic collection – Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan-Chet Baker, and other favorites – and if he doesn’t visit it every day, he confesses, “it’s pretty close to it.” If he can listen to classic records hundreds of times, perhaps it’s because, as a kid growing up in postwar Italy, he was weaned on his older brother’s small but essential collection of thirty or so 78’s. “Nobody (in Europe) had thousands of records like people today. They were hard to find, and for some reason he had only the best jazz records: Louis Armstrong & the Hot Five, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra.
“I was particularly fanatical about Bix – I pinned up the five or six existing pictures of him, where he never looked like the same person in each one. I read all the stories about him in Italian magazines like Musica Jazz. I was only 10 but already a jazz fanatic.” Then came Chet, who reminded him of a modern Bix, and Miles “and I freaked out completely. By the time I was 17 I had a very heavy collection of LPs.”
Rava speaks for a generation of post-war Europeans who felt the sudden influx of American jazz musicians and discs as a liberating force. They came to “adore” this “incredible” music – two words Rava uses often – more than Americans do. Europe became a key component in the careers of American jazz musicians, and this sense of liberation inevitably led to various schools of original indigenous European jazz. Rava’s early experience in New York went a long way in making him a star in Italy.
Having been discovered in Rome by Gato Barbieri (they played on Italian movie soundtracks), he was adopted by the great expat soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy when the former tangoed to Paris. They played London, South America and wound up in New York “where through Steve I immediately met everybody important – Ornette Coleman, Roswell Rudd, Albert Ayler, Bill Dixon, Carla Bley, Charlie Haden.
“My real difficulty was that I didn’t speak much English. With Steve I could speak French, but after a couple of months I was cut loose and had no idea what people were doing. Then one day after 6 months I woke up and began to understand what people were talking about. For a while I really felt like I was living in a movie, not only because of all the incredible music around me but also the city itself, with the Yellow cabs and tall buildings. You could step out every night and there were 20 places where the world’s greatest musicians played – Monk and then Miles at the Village Gate or Bill Evans at the Vanguard or Albert Ayler at Slug’s or Cecil Taylor or Jackie McLean, from the bebop era and before to the new thing.
“So here I was in heaven, even though I had little money.” It helped that Ornette’s drummer Charles Moffat introduced the dashing Rava to club cashiers as “a very important musician from Italy, etcetera,” enabling him to sneak in free, and jam with the likes of Hank Mobley or Archie Shepp.
Now, over 30 years later, Rava was back in a sentimental journey of sorts with Motian – long a mainstay on the European and Aisian jazz circuits, who at 74 stays put on Central Park West after a heart condition curtailed traveling – and the 32-year-old magician Bollani, whom he discovered a decade ago. The gregarious dreadlocked pianist, with a photographic memory of 2,000 tunes and imagination to match, is enormously popular in Italy as an entertainer (impersonator, comedian), but, says Rava, he “can play things nobody else can when he puts his mind to it.” (He’s been signed by ECM for – what else – a solo piano record.)
The audience in Italy for jazz has tripled over the last half dozen years, says Rava. No longer the only “jazzista” with an international profile, he is an iconic elder (with pianist Enrico Pieranunzi) for today’s wave of homegrown jazz stars – Bollani, trumpeters Paolo Fresu and Flavio Boltro, saxophonist Stefano Di Battista, clarinetists Gabriele Mirabassi and Gianluigi Trovesi, veteran accordionist Gianni Coscia. They routinely attract large audiences once reserved for visiting American stars.
“There’s an amazing differences of ages, from 15 to 85, from the rockers in tight pants to the old gentlemen in suits,” says Rava.
[OPTIONAL CUT] [“It’s not like in the ‘70s when people only came to free-jazz concerts because they thought it was associated with leftist causes, and ‘straight jazz’ was so-called CIA music. They came because they had to, or else they were considered passé. It wasn’t real. Now people come because they like it.”]51 [END OPTIONAL CUT]
What is weird, he says, is that the young audiences “come to jazz directly from us, not through the masters. They haven’t heard Clifford Brown or Ornette Coleman. This distorted vision is very strange – good for us, of course, but in a kind of perverted way.” What “scares” him is that despite the top-notch technical chops of many young musicians, “sometimes I get the impression I’m listening to a representation, like somebody ‘acting’ jazz.
“You feel a lack of depth because they never spent a second listening to Louis Armstrong or Bud Powell. They know Brad Mehldau – which is fine because he’s a great musician – but they never heard Bill Evans. They only know Monk through ‘Round About Midnight. This is kind of sad.”
That said, he smiles wryly, and says the competition has forced him to bone up on his chops. “I’m practicing a lot, which I never did in my life.”
Renewal and reflection characterize Rava today. He plays about 100 gigs annually, and shares his homes in Genoa and [xx] with his wife of 18 years, Jessica. He’s an inveterate reader who likes the classics. (He talks of dipping into Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past for the sixth time recently and “although I know it almost by heart I’m finally beginning to get it.”) He enjoys hard-boiled American moderns Paul Auster and Raymond Carver, but there’s Somerset Maughm, too. He rhapsodizes over Martha Argerich’s rendering of Ravel’s Piano Concerto and Glenn Gould’s early performances of the English Suites.
Rava’s sensitive burnished tone is immediately recognizable in Europe, yet his profile is relatively low in the U.S., where some critics still give European musicians short shrift.
“It would be like me saying Americans cannot play classical music because they’re not European and don’t understand the meaning. I’ve heard African-American sopranos who are so good they prove Puccini belongs to everybody. Yes, folkloric music does belong to certain groups of people. But from the middle of the 1920s jazz made the transition from the folkloric New Orleans style into art music, universal music that belonged to everyone who played it. Yes, it is American music, but it exists only because of African rhythms and European harmonies and melodies.” And, he will remind you with that smile, among the second or third generation Africans and Creoles playing jazz in New Orleans in the mid-1800s, there were more than a few Italians.
As for the new album’s title, it honors French absurdist filmmaker Jacques Tati and his 1953 classic Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. “Also, mention the word Tati in America and nobody knows what you’re talking about, so it’s kind of a curio.” Rava breaks out the classic hipster wry insider smile. “Maybe they seek out the movie and become richer for it.”