If you ever wanted to know the answer to the question “How many notes can contain a saxophone?” then Allegro Con Brio’s the disc for you. Not only do these guys offer a handy English-Italian phrasebook with such useful idioms as “Incredible! Two saxophones in one mouth!,” but the three saxophonists contain many excellent notes between them. Dato fans will know what to expect: track-titles that take you to distant lands and exotic climes; a sunny carnivalesque sense of humour, coexisting with the odd spell of melancholy; infectious rhythms closer to oompah-pah than swing. Despite their copious world-music influences Dato’s tunes sound more like Dato than anything else: short, foursquare riffs, the saxophone attacking the “one” of a bar like a blunt instrument. Sometimes I’ve found his discs one-dimensionally jolly, but Allegro Con Brio gets the balance between the sublime and the ridiculous just right. The good studio sound and the absence of a rhythm section lets the richness of the reeds’ sound sink in, and Dato and his partners – Piero Ponzo and Beppo Di Fillippo – never fall into the hectoring style of some all-sax bands. The album moves gracefully between skits like “Wolf symphony n. 37” and “Chantant l’amour Bucolique,” and some darkly beautiful moments, such as Di Fillippo’s aching tenor solo on “Red Tango” or Ponzo’s eloquent clarinet feature on “Ile de Gorée,” which does fine justice to its painful subject-matter. (Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, was a nexus of the African slave trade.) There’s no shortage of Carlo Actis Dato product out there – it’s likely that by the time you read this another Dato disc will have already hit the shops, given his current rate of production – but among his recent offerings Allegro Con Brio is a particularly good vintage, and I recommend you sample it.

Nate Dorward

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