Enrico Rava was born in Trieste in 1939. Self-taught, he started out playing Dixieland trombone but switched to trumpet at 18 after hearing Miles Davis. In 1962, he began a collaboration with Gato Barbieri, which brought him into contact with Don Cherry, Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy. He joined Lacy’s group in 1965, subsequently travelling with him through Europe, South America and the US. In New York, Rava worked with Cecil Taylor, the Jazz Composers Orchestra, and Roswell Rudd; back in Europe he lent his energies to the European avant-garde and the free players of the Globe Unity Orchestra. Even in experimental periods Rava remained firstly a melodic player, a tendency refined and developed through a career which has touched on all aspects of the jazz tradition. His first ECM album The Pilgrim and the Stars in 1975 already set high standards. He has won many national and international awards, including, in 2002, the ‘JazzPar Prize’, Europe’s biggest award for jazz players.
Enrico Rava’s band has meanwhile become a kind of finishing school for Italian jazz musicians, and many of his sidemen have gone on to become bandleaders in their own right, recent examples being Stefano Bollani, Giovanni Guidi and Gianluca Petrella. Petrella and Guidi recently recorded a collaborative album for ECM, on which they were joined by drummer Gerald Cleaver and clarinettist Louis Sclavis; the album will be issued in 2016.