On Cerco un paese innocente the Austrian trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler sets poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, sung in the original Italian. The subtitle describes it as a suite of songs and interludes for voice, untypical big band and soloists. It belongs to the period after Mantler's return to Europe, and it carries the work with singers he had begun on his own WATT label into a full jazz orchestra.
Mantler studied trumpet and musicology in Vienna, moved to the United States in 1962 and co-founded the Jazz Composer's Orchestra with Carla Bley. By the early 1990s he was based in Copenhagen. The recording was made there in January 1994, in Studio 3 of Danmarks Radio. It features the Copenhagen singer Mona Larsen and the Danish Radio Big Band conducted by Ole Kock Hansen. Mantler's own chamber group adds violin, two violas, cello, piano and guitar, and members of the band step out as soloists on clarinet and flute. Mantler plays trumpet and produced the album, with Lars Palsig as recording and mixing engineer.
The nineteen tracks are grouped in four parts, and five short orchestral intermezzi separate the songs. Several tracks join two or three brief poems into one setting, such as Inizio (1) / Solitudine / Lontano or Destino / Rilucere inveduto / Un'altra notte. In Girovago, Ungaretti's poem of the eternal wanderer, a solo clarinet takes over from the voice and leads into the first intermezzo. Perché? is the most dramatic setting, close to an operatic aria. The last part darkens through È senza fiato, where an electric guitar leads to the next song, and ends with Tutto ho perduto (I have lost everything).
ECM's note presents Ungaretti as one of the most influential modern poets, whose work deals with loneliness, love, nature and death. Writing on the ECM Reviews site in 2012, Tyran Grillo called Ungaretti the father of modern Italian poetry and praised Larsen's diction and range. He also turned the subtitle around, finding that "this seamless construction feels anything but untypical".
This is the CD edition, ECM 1556, first released in June 1995.
