Trumpeter Enrico Rava takes a radical departure from his normal jazz milieu and puts together a 12 piece band for a concert to focus on the music of ….Michael Jackson! The idea is actually a pretty good one, as The Gloved One wrote a number of incredible music pieces. The good news here is that “Ben” was not performed at this concert. For myself, the bad news is that most of the time the music has a blaring and bombastic feel to it that the joy of the music is overwhelmed by the extroversion.
Pieces like “Thriller,” “Little Susie” and “Speechless” are so familiar to most of us, and little is done to make us want to make these new versions our preferred ones. The choice of Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile” is intriguing, not only for it being a lovely spotlight for Rava’s horn, but the peculiar comingling of artists that seemed to have problems with adolescents.
The hyperbolic sounds here may have worked well at a concert, but taken in at a more sober mood makes think of the classic phrase “you had to be there.” Definitely geographic music.
ECM Records