Enrico Rava: To Be Free or Not To Be Free

AAJ: You've recorded four CDs dedicated to trumpeters Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker and Miles Davis, and you've recorded your interpretations of opera arias, Rava l'Opera Va (Label Bleu, 1993) and Carmen (Label Bleu, 1997). Do you have any plans to do more of these sort of projects?

ER: The band I did the Michael Jackson thing with belongs to the Auditorium of Rome. I am the Artistic Director of this band, and I have a contract to do four projects a year. Michael Jackson was the fourth project, and for next year I have to do four more projects. In mind I have Gil Evans-something from the beginning with Claude Thornhill and then maybe The Birth of the Cool. I'd like to do [Thelonious] Monk, Bix Beiderbecke, and then with a very good Italian singer called Maria Pia De Vito to do the tunes [singer/songwriter] Joni Mitchell did with [bassist/composer] Charles Mingus. So I have some projects in that sense.

AAJ: You played one gig in Napoli in December with this Tribe lineup. Are there plans to tour in 2012?

ER: In January we play ten dates in Italy, then we go to Paris, and then in February we have a tour in the States.

AAJ: You've been a jazz fan all your life. You've seen the greatest and you've played with the greatest. So if somebody asked you, "What is jazz?" what would you tell them?

ER: It is the music which saved my life and gave a reason to my life. Before I got into playing music, I was really despondent, and I really didn't know how to go on. When I started playing in my early 20s, everything became very clear. To me, jazz is the sound of this last century until now. It is the sound of the world. It is the score of Western history.