3 stars (DDE)
John Fordham
Friday January 27, 2006
Guardian
Paolo Porta is an Italian saxophonist with a growing European reputation. The title is not only an accurate description of the piece of the same name (which starts as a fast hard-bop feature and ends as a slowly weaving collective improvisation) but, intentionally or otherwise, of the whole enterprise. Porta seems pulled between the traditional fast-talking, cut-the-crap succinctness and cruising swing of the 1960s Blue Note hard bop style, and a more loosely structured music that owes more to the waywardly vivacious melodies of Ornette Coleman and the sheets-of-sound solo approach of John Coltrane.
Porta has an attractively bitter-sweet sound, and a manner of breaking up runs that recalls Art Pepper, and his band is coolly on top of the hard bop formula, hitting the accents hard - with pianist Luca Mannutza often sounding like early McCoy Tyner, and trumpeter Andy Gravish recalling the UK's Guy Barker. An account of I Didn't Know What Time It Was could have come off a mid-1950s Miles album, but Aribau 308 entwines a Thelonious Monk theme with an Ornetteish counter-melody and improvisation. Though some mid-tempo walkers and a slow Latin reverie return to the expected mix, it may be significant that the longest track at nearly 10 minutes is Underground - in which an engagingly dirgey, rising and falling horn-choir theme in free time, swaps with scaldingly fast swing - gets the best from trumpeter Gravish.
It's a mixed bag, but they may have been producing a CV as much as an insight into what they like doing best.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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