Arrigo Cappelletti Quintet: Hot Music

Pianist Arrigo Cappelletti's third album for UK-based Leo Records merges the best of many jazz propositions. With fellow Italians manning the frontline and the Norwegian rhythm section tendering sympathetic accompaniment, the musicians focus on melodic content, used as a vehicle for numerous song forms and extrapolations. Extremely tight and well-rehearsed, Cappelletti directs the quintet through knotty time signatures, spanning modern bop and sojourns into the free-zone. Other works combine softly woven horns, idiosyncratic thematic developments and motifs fashioned with controlled firepower. Each piece stands on its own, highlighting the leader's all-embracing approach to composition.

Cappelletti's guileful "Isafyordur 1" commences with bassist Adrian Myhr's edgy arco phrasings setting the stage for a sequence of flourishing thematic intervals, subsided by moments of restraint. The pianist subsequently aligns classical inferences with lush jazz phrasings but creates breathing room as the hornists intersect and provide shadings, while Cappelletti assumes a command and control role and builds a theme on a linear ostinato. Moreover, he delicately drives the momentum into a series of mini-motifs, casting an emotional roller coaster ride. Otherwise, Cappelletti's skillfully engineered arrangements caress numerous inferences of the jazz vernacular. It's an album that should not go unnoticed.