“When I left New York I left my entire record collection at a friend’s house, offering to come back for it. I have never done that! That’s the way it is when you go around the world. I am not a nostalgic person, the past is past.” – Enrico Rava
During the years of “La dolce vita,” a young Enrico Rava stayed in Rome in a furnished room near Via Sistina; he played regularly at Purgatorio, a jazz club carved out of a basement of the famous “Meo Patacca” restaurant in the Trastevere district, along with Argentine saxophonist Gato Barbieri, pianist Franco D’Andrea, drummer Gegé Munari and double bassist Gianni Foccià.
The quintet participated in 1964 in the recording of the soundtrack for the film “Before the Revolution” by director Bernardo Bertolucci and, just a year later, in that of the film “Una bella grinta,” by director Giuliano Montaldo.
In 1966 the Italian trumpeter, together with American saxophonist Steve Lacy, left the capital to leave for Argentina, where he would reside for a full year.
In the South American country he fell artistically in love with the traditional tango of Osvaldo Pugliese, without neglecting the admixtures with jazz of Astor Piazzolla’s tango nuevo. In addition, while in Argentina he had the opportunity to meet Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato and deepen his interest in the literary works of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Borges, and Julio Cortàzar.
Settling later in New York, he came into contact with a musical world hitherto only imagined. The trumpeter tells – “When I moved to New York I unexpectedly found myself playing with those musicians who had been my idols until some time before. In a short time, I became fully involved in the American and European avant-garde scene of people like Carla Bley and Cecil Taylor.”
While in the Big Apple, the trumpeter regularly returned to Buenos Aires, the city where Gato Barbieri’s wife Graciela’s cousin Michelle stayed to work. The trumpeter continued to travel to Argentina until 1976, a date that marked the worsening political situation in the country following the rise to power of General Videla’s dictatorship.
When Enrico Rava returned to Rome in 1968 to finalize the paperwork for his residency in the United States, he found a much-changed city: the years of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita were now over and in the capital there was a climate of strong protest, with a succession of demonstrations, riots and harsh clashes between students and police, in the context of a complicated change in the country’s social and political order. The trumpeter is staying in the apartment of double bassist friend Marcello Melis in Trastevere, while also frequenting Pepito Pignatelli’s jazz club Music Inn.
The trumpeter remembers the Roman jazz club owner this way – “Pepito was a central figure for Italian jazz, especially for us youngsters who were taking our first steps at that time. The Music Inn was an uncomfortable room with terrible acoustics, due to the too much humidity present the piano, as indeed the other instruments, was always out of tune. Nevertheless, we were there every night. The presence of Pepito and his wife Picchi was enough for us; they were the ones who lit up that little jazz club.”
A few years later, in 1972, Enrico Rava returned to Italy from the United States for a series of concerts, including in Milan and Turin, which had“great resonance in the newspapers.” This was due to the fact that at that time Rava is the only Italian jazz musician and one of the few European ones,-aside from Joe Zawinul and Miroslav Vitous. To reside in New York City.
This aspect puts the acceptance on a distinctive trait of the Italian trumpeter: his being a jazz globetrotter, constantly seeking varied cultural stimuli useful in defining a wide-ranging music. Not coincidentally, Rava is one of the most internationally known and appreciated Italian jazz musicians, particularly following his entry in the mid-1970s into the stable of Manfred Eicher’s prestigious Bavarian label ECM.
Regarding the public and critical acclaim garnered both in Italy and France in that early part of the 1970s, the trumpeter indulges in a remark – “We also have to consider the fact that, in the late 1970s, free jazz found a lot of space in newspapers because it was identified with the combination of jazz and certain left-oriented politics. This has allowed musicians like me or Giorgio Gaslini, for example, to get feedback from audiences outside the strictly jazz circuit as well. It sounds strange, but it was easier for those of our generation to carve out some media exposure compared to today’s musicians. One of the main reasons behind the current situation in Italy is to be found in the fact that, while iconic figures of Italian jazz like myself still benefit from that visibility accumulated over the years, musicians in their thirties or younger pay the price from the little attention from newspapers and media, remaining in most cases eternal promises.”
While touring Italy, the trumpeter crossed paths with a young talent from Rome’s jazz scene, Massimo Urbani. Impressed by his playing, he decided to have him join the band accompanying him on a few scheduled concerts in Italy, and then convinced to take him with him to New York for two weeks of concerts in the city’s clubs and on an American television program.
Between 1977 and 1979 Massimo Urbani also joined the ensembles with which Rava performed in Europe: the quintet with Bobo Stenson, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen and the quartet with Aldo Romano and J.F. Jenny Clark.
Speaking of Massimo Urbani, the trumpeter recalls – “I learned of his passing while I was in Vienna for recording sessions for a record. When I went to the newsstand in St. Stephen’s Cathedral Square to pick up the newspaper I was struck by the headline of an article about the sudden death of a Roman saxophonist.”
Note 1: The soundtrack recorded by the quintet with Barbieri, D’Andrea, Munari, Foccià for the film “Before the Revolution” will later be discarded in favor of the musical themes composed by Ennio Morricone and Gino Paoli
Paolo Marra
Interview by Paolo Marra
