Corners is the first ECM album by Enrico Rava's Fearless Five, the band of younger Italian musicians the trumpeter has led since 2022. Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano joins them as guest. All nine pieces are originals, and the writing is shared out: Rava brings three tunes, Lovano two, and every member of the quintet one. The record picks up the Italian-American partnership that Rava and Lovano began on Roma in 2019, now inside a working group with its own repertoire.
The band took shape after an impromptu concert outside Rome in 2022, when Rava decided almost at once that this should be his new group. Its name comes from his composition Fearless Five, first recorded on Enrico Rava Quartet for ECM in 1978. The quintet had already released an album under that name on Parco della Musica Records in 2024. Matteo Paggi's trombone stands beside Rava's trumpet and flugelhorn. Francesco Diodati plays guitar, Evita Polidoro drums and voice, and the quintet is completed by double bass. Lovano plays tenor saxophone and tárogató. The sessions took place on 21-23 July 2025 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone in Rome, as a co-production with Parco della Musica Records and Fondazione Musica per Roma. Manfred Eicher produced, and Stefano Amerio mixed the recording in Udine that October.
Rava's Certi Angoli Segreti opens the album and, at almost twelve minutes, is its longest track. Lovano's Sun Rava begins as an abstract blues, while his Tone, Shape and Colours is a free improvisation for the three horns, developed from a motif he brought to the studio. Rava's Bowery Dance, an older tune taken up again, looks back to his years in New York. Between these come shorter pieces by the younger players, among them Polidoro's Le Mie Gambe, on which she sings. Paggi's Mamma closes the set.
Since each of the musicians leads a band and composes, Rava thought it made sense for everyone to contribute tunes, and he says this makes Corners different from his other albums. ECM presents the record as a meeting of his lyrical style with new facets brought by his younger partners and by Lovano. The trumpeter has worked this way before, surrounding himself with a new generation of Italian players. Writing about the band's 2024 debut in Couleurs Jazz, Thierry Quénum noted that Diodati was "the only 'survivor'" of Rava's previous groups, with the rest of the line-up new to him.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2868, released on 16 October 2026. The cover photograph is by Max Franosch.
