Easy Living brought trumpeter Enrico Rava back to ECM in 2004, with his first album for the label since Volver in 1986. It also introduced a wider audience to two players from his regular Italian quintet, pianist Stefano Bollani and trombonist Gianluca Petrella. Eight of the nine pieces are Rava's own, and the mood is low-key but focused, with the trumpet singing over a loose, attentive band. Rava told All About Jazz that he thought it was "by far the best record I ever made".
The quintet recorded in June 2003 at Artesuono Recording Studio in Udine, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. Bassist Rosario Bonaccorso and drummer Roberto Gatto, a partner of Rava's for many years, complete the line-up. The trumpet and trombone front line gives the writing room for close counterpoint, and Bollani often plays against the leader rather than simply behind him. In 2002, the year before the session, the Jazzpar Prize jury had named Rava musician of the year.
Cromosomi opens the record with Rava and Petrella weaving their lines around each other, over Bollani's sparse piano and Gatto's light accents. Algir Dalbughi is built on a boogie figure in Bollani's left hand and opens into an agile up-tempo trumpet solo, with Petrella's harmonies giving the theme an almost big-band weight. Blancasnow revisits the yearning ballad that closed Rava's ECM debut, The Pilgrim And The Stars, in 1975. The title track, by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin, is the only standard.
Stuart Nicholson wrote in Jazzwise that the quintet produced "one of the most perfectly rounded aesthetic statements you are likely to find in jazz of recent times". In The Guardian, John Fordham called Rava "one of Miles Davis's most imaginative inheritors" and singled out the ensemble intensity of Traveling Night. The album was a Choc du mois in Le Monde de la Musique and an Editor's Choice in Jazz Review.
This CD is the 2019 reissue of ECM 1760, first released in March 2004. It belongs to the Touchstones series, through which ECM has been bringing catalogue albums back into print in card packaging since 2008.
