Giovanni Guidi Trio - City of Broken Dreams

Pianist Giovanni Guidi (born 1985), is one of the most outstanding musicians to have emerged from the ranks of Italian jazz in the last decade and has already made his presence felt on two of Enrico Rava's ECM albums, Tribe and On The Dance Floor. Rava has praised both Guidi's limitless curiosity as an improviser and his relentless refinement of touch and musical taste. Now Guidi introduces his new international trio with US bassist Thomas Morgan and Portuguese drummer Jo�o Lobo, and a shimmering inner-directed music of striking originality.

His first leader date for ECM is a glowing, creatively daring collection of self-penned tunes, with many adroit exchanges between the musicians. Plenty of space is given to bassist Morgan, whose role in the Guidi Trio is perhaps analogous to Scott LaFaro's in the Evans Trio. Drummer Lobo is another highly original musician, poetically shading the music with a delicate tracery of cymbals.

In these haunting compositions, melodies can suddenly scuttle crabwise, and rhythms may be dislocated and stretched, sometimes setting up considerable tension, as on No Other Possibility. Sometimes, as on The Way Some People Live, Guidi casts down a carpet of gentle arpeggios for Morgan to glide across. Jo�o Lobo, an acute commentator, punctuates The Impossible Divorce, with disconsolate lunges at tom-toms and scrapes sticks agonizingly across cymbals at the climax of Late Blue. As the impressions accumulate, the City of Broken Dreams begins to seem like a short story collection, a series of vignettes from a lonesome place, to which the listener will feel drawn to return.

Personnel: Giovanni Guidi (piano), Thomas Morgan (double bass), Jo�o Lobo (drums)