Enrico Rava's Fearless Five charts new ground with Lovano

Enrico Rava, one of Italy's most accomplished jazz musicians, has released Corners on the ECM label, an album that pairs the Italian trumpeter with American saxophonist Joe Lovano. According to John Fordham's review in the Guardian, the Fearless Five group—built around Rava and Lovano—navigates originals and free improvisation while anchoring itself in the harmonic and rhythmic territory Miles Davis opened in his later work. The album balances late-Miles funk with vocal passages and horn ballads, drawing on methods that transformed jazz composition in the decades after Davis's own experiments.

Rava's career has long positioned him at the intersection of European jazz sophistication and American idiom. The trumpeter, who studied composition and has worked across both classical and jazz worlds, brings to the ECM aesthetic a precision of tone and harmonic awareness that the label has cultivated since its founding. Lovano, a veteran of the American avant-garde and a longtime collaborator with figures like Ornette Coleman, brings a different lineage—one rooted in the free-jazz tradition and in the saxophone's capacity to blur melody and texture. Their pairing on Corners suggests a conversation between two regional approaches to the same musical language.