East Travel

The packaging of the CD version of this little Italian release gives no information about how it came about, other than the fact that several of the musicians involved, including arranger Valter Sivilotti, have previously crossed over between classical music and jazz or pop. Very little, in fact, prepares you for its absolute originality. The album offers 18 songs by Brazilian songwriter and bossa nova pioneer Antonio Carlos Jobim, most of them quite famous, and haphazardly identified by their Portuguese or English titles. Most are arranged for the odd combination of saxophone, string quartet, and tabla or other small drum; an accordion makes guest appearances, and on a few pieces the string quartet or the saxophone gets to do its thing alone. The results are entrancing. The key is the variety of roles given to the string quartet, which fills in the harmony like a piano, provides the harmonic-rhythmic root like a string bass with a plucked cello, takes the melody, or provides some kind of structural introduction or marker, often switching back and forth between these roles within the same number. The beauty of all this flexibility is that the arrangement brings new insights into Jobim's famous melodies, revealing their often considerable complexity. Consider for example the modernistic version of Desafinado (track 14), which is given to the string quartet alone and could pass for a contemporary string quartet. Each piece is different, and the diversity increases as the album goes along. The most famous Jobim melody of all, The Girl from Ipanema, is unexpectedly given to a solo baritone saxophone. The pieces just named are on the experimental side, but elsewhere the strings serve to intensify the original mood of the piece and produce pleasantly romantic readings. Strongly recommended, even for those beyond the obvious audience of Jobim fans; in its way this is a unique document of classical-jazz fusion., Rovi