* Enrico Rava: trumpet
* Francesco Diodati: guitar
* Gabriele Evangelista: double bass
* Enrico Morello: drums
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* Gianluca Petrella: trombone
Enrico Rava, the great Italian jazz trumpeter, sifted through avant-swing,
improv and experimental crossovers for years, then discovered Michael Jackson
in his 70s, and devoted an utterly personal tribute album to him in the company
of younger partners. Wild Dance is similarly cross-generational, with an
expanded Rava road band, fronted for the occasion by the leaderâ™s trumpet
paired with the trombone of Gianluca Petrella, a supple maestro of voicelike
long tones, bebop intricacies and inbuilt swing. Ravaâ™s Miles-inspired lyricism
and tone control on slow music often takes centre stage in his work, but though
the softly meditative Space Girl (with its distant intimations of drum
uprisings that donâ™t materialise), or the wistful Sola and Overboard show that
side of him, the blurted Ornette Coleman-like flurries of Infant or Happy
Shades, the guitar-driven swinger Cornette, or the soft bop F Express, over the
excellent Enrico Morelloâ™s bustling brushwork, represent effortlessly inventive
uptempo jazz playing. The closing Frogs, with its upwardly scuttling two-horn
melody over guitar and bass vamps and its rattling drumwork, is the tour de force.