Giovanni Tommaso

A document hidden in plain sight. Recorded at the close of 1969 within Rome's RCA studios and released the following year on the Sermi label, Giovanni Tommaso's Indefinitive Atmosphere has circulated in whispers among collectors for decades - a solo debut so far ahead of its moment that it needed half a century to be properly heard. Its reissue by Sonor Music Editions, remastered from the original tapes, is a genuinely important event. When Tommaso - Tuscany-born, New York-tempered, already intimate with the approaches of Charles Mingus, Paul Chambers, and Ray Brown after his formative years circulating through Manhattan's jazz clubs at the turn of the 1960s - entered the RCA studios in Rome, he arrived not as an accompanist but as a composer with something urgent to say. Indefinitive Atmosphere was his first statement under his own name, predating the legendary jazz-rock formation Perigeo by two years. It belongs to a different, rawer, more restless state of creative becoming.

The music moves between registers with the ease of someone who has fully dissolved the boundaries between them. Jazz-funk rhythms harden and crack open. Free jazz episodes appear with sudden, unannounced intensity. A strings section threads through the ensemble's tighter configurations, adding weight and color without domesticating the music's propulsive edge. Tommaso's electric bass and contrabass anchor everything without dominating - the compositions breathe around the low-end, leaving room for Franco D'Andrea's piano to push against the grain, and above all for the soprano saxophone of Steve Lacy, whose serpentine phrasing and tonal specificity give the record its sharpest, most memorable voice.

Five hundred and twenty-four names on the Discogs wantlist for the original pressing. Copies, when they surface, command prices that put them beyond casual reach. Sonor Music Editions' reissue - pressed in a limited edition of 800 copies, with tip-on sleeve and remastered audio - is the first serious opportunity most collectors will ever have to own this record. An essential piece of Italian jazz history, now where it belongs.