Splasc(h) has long performed the important job of documenting the full range of Italian jazz, from the postbop mainstream to the work of free-jazz radicals like Mario Schiano; lately they’ve also launched a new “Contemporary Series”, packaged in fold-out card cases rather than the regular jewel case, which features improvised music with affinities to contemporary New Music (perhaps on the model of ECM’s New Series?). The discs in this recent batch are, with one exception, based around the piano, and mostly work within the mainstream jazz tradition; the instrumentation ranges from solo performance to quintet, the most extensively represented format being the classic piano trio.

Guido Manusardi is a veteran of the Italian jazz scene – he’s now in his late 60s. Siena Concert catches his trio in relaxed and upbeat mood at the 2000 Siena Jazz Festival. The spirit of Bill Evans hovers over Manusardi’s playing, though not overpoweringly. The pianist does, though, have a nice line in moody Evansish compositions like “Isola” and “Dany Tune.” Manusardi doesn’t come off especially well as a balladeer, however: his reading of “Over the Rainbow” is all right, but it’s hamstrung by his literal-minded, every-beat-on-the-beat chording. All in all, Siena Concert is a goodish date, and the audience sounds enthusiastic, but to be truthful it’s no-one’s shining hour. Terzano’s busy LaFaroisms are OK, but Cazzola is not a subtle drummer and things are made worse by the unflattering recording quality. There are also rather too many rough spots (such as the shaky trading of eights on “Isola,” which really ought to have been edited out).

Same festival, same venue, same piano, same recording engineer, but a day later on Paolo Birro’s Live at Siena the sound quality is suddenly vastly improved, and the music is also on a whole different level. Birro is a wonderfully complete player, and he has an uncanny ability to infiltrate a tune and make it his own, whether through the subtlest touches or by stretching it like taffy. These improvisations get as far in to the tunes as, say, Jarrett or Mehldau, but with altogether less spectacle – he’s a master of discreet subversiveness (check out, for instance, the dreamy, gauzy opening choruses of “Stablemates”). That said, when Birro does actually turn the taps on full he can be almost overwhelming. On “Alcool,” he catches the listener off-guard with an almost diffident start, a modest entryway into a fantastically elaborate structure that finds room for everything from the loosely funky to knots of egghead counterpoint. It’s a solo so full it seems as if it will burst: it’s almost a relief when Birro offhandedly pulls the rug from under it and makes his escape. Birro’s partners are with him all the way, following every hairpin turn as if it were the gentlest of curves. I might quibble a little about Aldo Zunino’s Mingusy bass – not quite the ideal stylistic match, perhaps? – but he’s nonetheless a sympathetic and keen-witted partner. The drummer Alfred Kramer (best known to North American listeners for his work with Enrico Pieranunzi’s Space Jazz Trio) is a delight, a wonderfully delicate and playful accompanist. From the opening “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” with its hair-raising piano-drums duet, to the closing off-kilter reading of “Little Willie Leaps” redolent of Bud Powell, this album is an exemplary instance of the art of the trio.

The other Birro disc in this batch, Hidden Songs, is no less exceptional. The pianist is joined by tenor saxophonist Emanuele Cisi for a set of duets that take a winding Tristanoite path through some familiar chord changes (David Raksin’s “Aural,” Cole Porter’s “Homework” . . . I’ll let you figure out the rest). But despite the presence of telltale Cool School hallmarks (fiendishly long and insinuating lines negotiated with a Zen calm; Cisi’s use of the high register beloved of Warne Marsh), the music is not necessarily easy to pigeonhole stylistically. Cisi cultivates a warm, romantic tone, for instance, which owes a clear debt to another great Italian-American jazz musician, Joe Lovano. Despite the absence of a rhythm section the players hit a relaxed, supple groove that’s as palpable and insistent as a heartbeat, and even when the pianist lays out behind Cisi (as on parts of “Do You Remember Me?”) the saxophonist has no trouble rising to the challenge of keeping the time solid singlehandedly. Like Birro’s Live at Siena Jazz, Hidden Songs numbers among the year’s outstanding jazz releases.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. The third piano trio disc in the bunch, Piero Bassini’s Inner Dance, a clumsy McCoy Tyner knockoff, needn’t detain us long. Nor need Fabio Riso’s Improvvisi (from Splasc(h)’s “Contemporary Series”), a collection of brief and one-dimensional exercises in atonal polyphony which the liner notes optimistically compare to Stockhausen. Each album features only one standard, and curiously enough it’s the same one: “Stella by Starlight.” Bassini’s version has the edge over Riso for sheer awkwardness and muddle, but Riso does manage to achieve a warm glow of preciousness and self-regard, and even more intriguingly seems unable to make up his mind whether to swing it or play it out of time. It’s modestly entertaining to hear, though not quite in the way the performer intended.

Luigi Bonafede’s To Include starts off like it means business, with the ominous bass-piano unison that announces the driving original “Poker.” It’s an assured opening to a rich and accomplished album. Bonafede has assembled a hot and eager band, and has given them a lot to chew on: all seven originals here sound quite different from each other and pose markedly different challenges to the players. It’s mostly in a contemporary hard bop idiom, but there’s a surprisingly effective hiphop workout called “To Steve” (Steve Coleman?), which is jumped on with enthusiasm and finesse by Negri and Beggio, the two youngest players in the band. “‘Eleo’” sounds like Mal Waldron’s “Snake Out” visited by the spirit of Bobby Timmons, and it develops into an unfettered workout for Boltro and Bonafede. All five musicians are in fine form, but a word is in order for reedsman Negri, whose gets a bent, somewhat Dolphyish sound out of his horns – it’s a sound as blunt, rude and instantly arresting as a piece of graffiti. On “Obstinate,” a bop swinger rather drolly scored for clarinet and muted trumpet, Negri gets off a solo as waywardly brilliant as anything in the Don Byron canon.

The other quintet disc here is no less interesting but at a considerable stylistic remove from the orthodox contemporary jazz of To Include. Atem (again, part of the “Contemporary Series”) was recorded in France, and the band comprises two Italian and three French musicians; the core of the group seems to be the duo of pianist Stefano Battaglia and percussionist Michele Rabbia, who have worked together since 1999. It’s an album with a fascinating instrumentation (violin, cello, tuba, piano, percussion), one which lends itself equally to intimate free-improv encounters and to gorgeous chamber-music textures that can recall Messiaen (“Lamentation des Anges”) or minimalism (“Sonet”). The album is divided into two unequal halves. At its centre is a series of free improvisations – miniatures often less than two minutes long – which mostly feature the band in small subsections. The results are appealingly varied and colourful, ranging from the harsh scrabbling of “Misture” and “Carte du Tendre” to the mysterious “Dileguando,” on which Battaglia’s piano chording is worthy of John Taylor. Sometimes the pieces are almost epigrammatic, setting forth a simple texture and then making a graceful exit. On other occasions – such as the controlled tumult of “Hommage a Emil Zatopek,” by Pifarély, Battaglia and Godard – the effect of the improvisation’s brevity is more like that of a controlled explosion. These twenty improvisations are bookended by two compositions by Battaglia, both of which borrow from the language of minimalism: indeed, “Sonet” wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Gavin Bryars’ After the Requiem. All is not always what it seems: over the 11 minutes of “Atem” the placidly consonant piano arpeggios gradually darken as the strings become almost alarmingly plangent. An exceptional album. A special word of praise is in order for the knockout tuba-player Michel Godard: I’ve often heard far less melodic and supple playing from trombonists.

Guitarist Matteo Turella is the odd man out here, as the leader of the only disc in this batch without a piano. On Headache his youthful quartet delivers a slice of rocked-up guitar-driven jazz a la Scofield. The results are engaging but uneven. The group is at its best on exuberent numbers like “C-Free-Pedal-Point” or Mingus’s “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines,” but rather less secure on David Liebman’s “All the Things You Are” variant “All the Things That,” and downright drab on Turella’s ballad feature “My Foolish Heart.” To my ears the most interesting thing on the disc is the vigorous, confident work of saxophonist Robert Bonisolo. It’s not a disc of pressing interest to any North American listener already familiar with the work of Scofield, Stern, Goodrick, &c, but it’s a likeable enough effort nonetheless.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, December 2002