Enrico Rava: Rava on the Dance Floor – review

It's taken Enrico Rava , the Miles Davis -inspired trumpeter from Trieste, until his 70s to hit the dance floor. This live album is dedicated to Michael Jackson, who Rava said he didn't discover until the singer's death – and then became obsessed with. Thriller, Smooth Criminal, Blood on the Dance Floor and other classics make up a track list exuberantly performed last year by Rome's Parco della Musica Jazz Lab, a young workshop band led by trombonist Mauro Ottolini, whose arrangements these are. A wonderful ballad-player, Rava plays Speechless rather as Davis played Jackson's Human Nature , and boiling groovers like Thriller in flashes of shrill improv over tuba riffs and rumbling congas. Privacy is an electric guitar and soul-sax maelstrom, Smile is a New Orleans street march strut, and Little Susie (the best track) features Rava in Mediterranean heat-haze mode, before a lilting waltz partnership with Danielle Tittarelli's alto sax. It sounds like a laid-back jazz group having a party, not a Quincy Jones band nailing every hit, but it's a real tribute, not a lament for lost youth.