Ritornare is the first ECM recording by Sardinian saxophonist and clarinettist Enzo Favata, made with Atlantico, the acoustic quintet he formed in 1999. The title means "to return": Favata brought the group back together in 2024, some eighteen years after its last concert. Its music joins jazz, chamber dynamics and improvisation to the musical traditions of the Mediterranean and of Latin America.

Favata plays soprano saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet. Marcello Peghin, his long-time partner, plays ten-string guitar, Daniele di Bonaventura bandoneon, Salvatore Maltana double bass and U.T. Gandhi drums. The quintet recorded in January 2026 at Bavaria Musikstudios in Munich, with Manfred Eicher producing and Stefano Amerio as engineer. Gandhi died unexpectedly on 10 August 2026, aged 66, a few weeks before the album came out. Favata, born in Alghero in 1956, had earlier worked with Enrico Rava, Dino Saluzzi and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The pieces grow from the band's early touring in South America and from Latin American writers, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende among them. ECM presents the album with an epigraph from García Márquez's memoir Living to Tell the Tale, and Favata speaks of places "suspended between dream and reality". Three titles echo pieces on the original Atlantico album of 1999: Peghin's Tukuman, which opens the set, El Sur, by Favata and Peghin, and Favata's Milonga del Sol. Di Bonaventura contributes Sine nomine, at almost nine minutes the longest track, and the closing Albatros. The other pieces are by Favata, alone or with Peghin and Maltana.

The first Atlantico record, released in 1999 by Il Manifesto, sold more than 50,000 copies, and between 1999 and 2004 the quintet played over 400 concerts, including four Latin American tours. Ritornare rethinks that sound in the light of what each member has done since. ECM quotes Ian Patterson, reviewing a concert at the Baku Jazz Festival for All About Jazz: "in Favata's world, and like all great groups, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

This is the CD edition, ECM 2883, released on 18 September 2026. The cover photograph is by Jan Kricke.