Enrico Rava, the great Italian jazz trumpeter, sifted through avant-swing, improv and experimental crossovers for years, then discovered Michael Jackson in his 70s, and devoted an utterly personal tribute album to him in the company of younger partners. Wild Dance is similarly cross-generational, with an expanded Rava road band, fronted for the occasion by the leader’s trumpet paired with the trombone of Gianluca Petrella, a supple maestro of voicelike long tones, bebop intricacies and inbuilt swing. Rava’s Miles-inspired lyricism and tone control on slow music often takes centre stage in his work, but though the softly meditative Space Girl (with its distant intimations of drum uprisings that don’t materialise), or the wistful Sola and Overboard show that side of him, the blurted Ornette Coleman-like flurries of Infant or Happy Shades, the guitar-driven swinger Cornette, or the soft bop F Express, over the excellent Enrico Morello’s bustling brushwork, represent effortlessly inventive uptempo jazz playing. The closing Frogs, with its upwardly scuttling two-horn melody over guitar and bass vamps and its rattling drumwork, is the tour de force.
