For Me

Pianist Massimo Faraò is one of those Italian musicians who takes the spirit of the blues very seriously — perhaps. When accompanied by his mates, Aldo Zunnio on bass and drummer Gianni Cazzola, they come off sounding like a joyful bunch of jazzers digging the hell out of the tradition and pushing forth their own brand of Italian new jazz lyricism into the mix. Take this date that begins with Faraò's "That's How We Like It" — here the I-IV-V vamp moves through two territorial changes on its way to Italian jazz, one is through the hard-edged funky styling of Ramsey Lewis in the '60s and the other is through Ray Charles, as the piece literally quotes "I Got a Woman" and Lewis' gospel-ized version of "Dancing in the Street." It's all shadowy chord voicing, backbeat savvy, and greasy funk. Elsewhere, when the band interprets tunes from the jazz canon such as Ron Carter's "Saguaro," Ray Brown's "F.S.R," or Tommy Flanagan's "Beats Up," the trio distills everything down to blues essence and build up harmonically from there. Things can get a bit florid, but with Zunnio's rhino-charging bass playing that keeps itself deep in the wood, they never get far from the dog's bone. On Cazzola's "Blues for Franco," the trio adds Flavio Boltro on trumpet, and Dado Moroni joins as a second bassist on three cuts, including "Beats Up." In these instances, Faraò constructs an elongated ostinato architecture that is more than vamp and shuffle; it punctuates the lines with harmonic extensions on the changes that the rhythm players take as cues for accented dynamics. This is tight, straight-ahead jazz played with veteran chops and a righteous depth of emotion.