Edizione Speciale is a live set by Enrico Rava, recorded in the summer of 2019, the year the Trieste-born trumpeter turned eighty and ECM marked its fiftieth anniversary. He leads a sextet of younger Italian musicians, most of whom he has mentored, through six long pieces that move from open, Ornette-inflected playing to ballads and a Cuban song. It is his eighteenth recording for ECM.
The concert took place on 18 August 2019 at the Jazz Middelheim festival in Antwerp and was recorded by the Flemish broadcaster VRT, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer. Rava plays flugelhorn throughout. Beside him are Francesco Bearzatti on tenor saxophone, Francesco Diodati on guitar and Giovanni Guidi on piano, with double bass and drums completing the band. Rava has said he chose players he could give "a lot of freedom", and the repertoire draws on his 1978 album Enrico Rava Quartet and on Wild Dance from 2015.
Infant opens with an unaccompanied flugelhorn introduction before the band comes in at full tilt. Jazz Journal heard in it echoes of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry in the early 1960s. The longest track joins Once Upon a Summertime, the English version of Michel Legrand's La valse des lilas, to Rava's own Theme for Jessica Tatum. Over almost seventeen minutes the ballad turns into a medium-tempo piece carried by Guidi's piano. Wild Dance, credited to Rava's 2015 quartet, has the loose, free tempo he calls "clouds of sounds", and Diodati's guitar swings between quiet lyricism and noisy, dissonant outbursts. The set closes in a lighter mood with Osvaldo Farrés's Quizás, Quizás, Quizás.
Reviewers agreed on the energy of the occasion. In BBC Music Magazine Roger Thomas wrote of "a fine concentration of both Rava's energy and that of the assembled musicians, who tackle the whole project with both exuberance and discipline." Mike Gates of UK Vibe praised the tightness of the sextet as a whole and called the album "Joyous, free-spirited jazz from the Italian veteran." Nick Lea in Jazz Views described the music as a path from deep melody to abstraction and back again.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2672, first released on 29 October 2021.
