COMPOSERS: Actis Band
LABELS: Leo
PERFORMER: Carlo Actis Dato’s Actis Band
CATALOGUE NO: CD LR 365
Having regrouped by retreating into neo-classicism in the Eighties, jazz reasserted itself in the Nineties by resorting to one of its classic strategies: extending hospitality to an extraordinary variety of other musics, adapting and assimilating them.
The music was thus able to emerge in the new millennium as unashamedly polystylistic, yet retaining its core strengths: interactive spontaneity and improvisational imagination.
Consequently, an average month’s new issues will now run the stylistic gamut, from the strictly conventional, through the mildly eccentric, to the wholly individual.
If Brecker’s music could have been produced only in New York, the music of multi-reedsman Carlo Actis Dato’s Actis Band could only be Italian. Like much contemporary Italian jazz, Garibaldi draws uncontrivedly on a whole range of indigenous music – tarantella, the banda tradition, even opera – as well as on delightfully unpredictable elements from elsewhere – surf guitar, South American music, Mike Stern-like verbosity – to produce one of the most wide-ranging and immediately entertaining albums of recent times.
Packed with fizzing pep and biting wit – not to mention uninhibited, chattering soloing, infectiously danceable rhythms and passages of no-holds-barred freedom – Garibaldi is yet another wholly original album from a band that should be celebrated worldwide.