Enrico Rava and Lester Bowie: The program “Suona Una” dedicated four episodes to a conversation with Enrico Rava, a portrait: Videos. Photos

New York 1978, Rava with Lester Bowie: We have thus arrived at a sort of ‘a la carte’ and deferred radio, where things of some interest are discovered and listened to after a few days, and among other things with the rather poor technical standard of Radio RAI podcasts (mp3 at 95 Kps, less than a third of the bandwidth used by Radio Svizzera Italiana, just to give you an idea).

If something concerning the world of jazz is broadcast outside the ‘Indian reservation’ of RadioTre Il Cartellone – a phenomenon that is also supernatural – you have to rely on chance and good luck, or on the search engine of the RadioTre website, an option that can easily be included in the first.

And it was by pure chance that I learned that at the end of the year the program ‘Suona l’Una’ on RadioTre dedicated four episodes to a conversation – portrait with Enrico Rava, curated by Helmut Failoni. Here you should be able to access the four podcasts of the program, I hope even in the absence of the Radio Play app in which RAI has very questionably locked up its radio content.

The opportunity is obviously very tempting, for several reasons. In times of just revaluation of the so-called ‘oral history’, the story of a man who played a leading role in Italian jazz from the early 1950s to the 1920s – almost 70 years of music, mind you – has an almost inestimable value as a testimony, also because to this day there is still no book that organically reconstructs the adventure of our jazz over the last 60 years (we are still waiting for the long-awaited publication of the third volume of ‘Il Jazz in Italia’ that Adriano Mazzoletti should have had time to complete before leaving us)

Fully counter to the times, Rava is a character who is not inclined to media attention, and his public appearances are mostly limited to journalistic interviews, with all their limitations in terms of tight deadlines and lack of space for extended narrations and reasoning.

And instead Cav. Enrico is a man of priceless and unstoppable storytelling skills, which in the case of the broadcast in question are somewhat weakened by a management that indulges in a certain hagiographic rhetoric and above all fragmented by too frequent musical inserts (simple clips, among other things, not even complete songs) that take away organicity from our man’s speech.

“I can’t say I feel like a Turin native (…), I left a gray, working-class city, where very little happened…” certainly not a masterpiece of diplomacy, when the director of the Torino Jazz Festival who signed you up interviews you :-). Watch out for the ‘non-advice’ to aspiring jazzmen. Also the joke about tiredness helping music… “I almost almost came from Milan on foot”

I admit that my point of comparison is a very particular occasion: a presentation at a JazzMi years ago (maybe in 2019) in which the host of the meeting gave him the floor for some of his considerations for the fiftieth anniversary of ECM: an hour and a half later Rava was still narrating in front of an audience electrified by an incredible performance worthy of the best Woody Allen of the vintage. But in this unstoppable – and uncontrollable – flow of priceless irony (and above all of self-irony, a very rare commodity on our music scene today) we were dispensed in all simplicity and with an air of not seeming some authentic pearls of musical wisdom, which still guide my paths as a listener today.

But we hope to make up for it as soon as possible with the second part of his musical autobiography, one of the most brilliant and entertaining books I have picked up in recent years: we are eagerly awaiting it.

Once again the Rava cartoonized by Altan… very faithful to the original. For now, let’s be content with what the RAI convent passes by, which divides the Rava epic into four chapters: the beginnings in the gray Turin and the debut in Rome, the adventure in Argentina with Steve Lacy, the New York of the late ’60s and the ’70s together with Gato Barbieri, and finally the return to Europe.

Interviews, books, comics… but it can’t end like this… And here is the music of what is perhaps the most beautiful Italian group of recent years, unfortunately not documented as much as it deserved. ECM probably chose this concert recorded by Belgian Radio TV in consideration of the 10-minute (timed) ovation that concluded it. But I can assure you that even at JazzMi 2019 Special Edition he gave an extraordinary concert, which deserved the album…

Post Scriptum: the 2021 edition of Umbria Jazz Winter took place in the midst of the Cov19 emergency, with consequent unforeseen events and defections. On December 31st at the Teatro Mancinelli a noticeable void opens up due to a forfeit… and who arrives at the last minute, with the after-effects of a serious, very serious illness behind them? But Cav. Enrico, who gathers his Special Edition members, some conscripted directly under the nativity scene. I still remember the concert that followed as if it were yesterday… here is a ‘splinter’. Notice the mask on our man’s wrist while he plays…