Alla Boara: Le Tre Sorelle

Sustaining a career as a full-time working musician, especially if you live far from major urban centers, requires that you speak several languages. With a resume that includes party band Hey Mavis to the acclaimed period-instrument Baroque orchestra Apollo's Fire, Cleveland-based drummer Anthony Taddeo qualifies on musical terms.

But he also picked up his father's native language during a three-month interval in Italy that would prove decisive in his musical development. The result is Le Tre Sorelle, a graceful, charming and stylish recording that uses traditional folk melodies as a jumping off point.

Taddeo's muse was the series of field recordings made in Italy in 1953-54 by the American folklorist Alan Lomax, two of which are woven into Taddeo's reimagining of the traditional melodies. The instrumentation of trumpet, guitar, accordion, bass and percussion would not be out of place in a Neapolitan piazza. Yet if the band has an Italian heart, it has a modern-jazz mind that incorporates advanced harmonies, shifting rhythms, high-wire soloing and complex structures.

There is nothing more traditional here than the melody of the now-extinct work song that inspired "The Almond Sorters." Taddeo stirs the pot by stretching it over an 11/8 rhythm for Tommy Lehman's athletic trumpet and a rangy solo by guitarist Daniel Bruce.

Similarly "Funeral Lament" clothes Lomax's recording of an elderly professional mourner's lamentations in an eerie, post-"In A Silent Way" sonic haze where the wheezy low pedal tones of Clay Colley's accordion suggest the presence of the deceased. It's spookier than the widow's traditional black.

Taddeo's command of color and texture impresses throughout, but you cannot really do justice to Italian music without a singer, and in Amanda Powell Alla Boara has a versatile, classically trained soprano who has sung in Italian (and several other languages) for decades.

On the title song, she effortlessly picks up the silvery thread of sweet innocence in Lomax's field recording of the charming melody. Two cuts later, she puts vocal steel into the spine of "Fimmene, Fimmene," a song of female empowerment that soars into an Amazonian scat episode that conjures both the river and the fierceness of the female warriors.

But this would not be a proper representation of the Italian spirit without a celebration, and Le Tre Sorelle has two bangers that link the twin aspects of Taddeo's identity. "Ballu" is based on polyphonic music from Sardinia where singers imitate the sounds of livestock. Bruce takes the barnyard inspiration literally, with guitar work straight out of Bill Frisell's Americana bag while bassist Ian Kinnaman and the leader on brushes goose Lehman's leaping solo.

After starting in a Calabrian-to-Cajun slow waltz groove, a snare-drum tattoo from the leader launches "Mi Me Ne Fon" through a cycle of rhythms that end up on a kind of Cuban conga-meets-New Orleans party groove. Lehman gets the spirit with a strutting solo scaled for a street parade. Taddeo caps the breathless sprint to the finish with his only drum solo of the session.

It is an example of Italian sprezzatura expressed through the medium of the shout-chorus drum explosion—as perfect an expression of Taddeo's intercontinental aesthetic as you can imagine. Bravo!

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