Enrico Fazio Quintet - Euphoria (1991)

For this album comprised solely of his own material, bassist and composer Enrico Fazio from the Piedmont region of Italy assembled his band for this debut recording session. Fazio was well equipped with a band featuring Carlos Actis Dato and Francesco Vigone on saxophones, Alberto Mandarini on trumpet, Fiorenzo Sordini on drums, and guests Fanca Silveri on his Mingus tribute, "Charlie's Angels," and vocalist Lauro Rossi on "Gardel," which opens the album. "Gardel" is a variation on the themes of the great tango maestro Carlos Gardel. Its rhythmic structure is a tango and its thematic variations are based on the five tango modes. There is an ostinato in the center, which opens out onto a roguish vamp for Mandarini's solo. But the true masterpiece on this disc is "Charlie's Angels," a composition for which Fazio won an award at the Sardinia International Jazz Festival. Only 14 minutes in length, it manages to take the Mingus themes of "Better Git It in Your Soul," "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," "Fables of Faubus," "Pithecanthropus Erectus," and "Self Portrait in Three Colors" and weave them through a gorgeous composition that winds through blues, New Orleans, swing, Ellingtonian grandeur, and funky gutbucket bop as it juxtaposes Mingus' thematics inside a framework that spreads out historically and culturally from the center of jazz' location at the nexus of musical culture. The piece is full of blood, sweat, lust, tears, and blacker than blue blues. As it unfolds -- with the bass in the heart, the trumpet and saxophones at the margins, and the drums reining it all in -- it feels like Mingus' spirit is evoked from the studies of harmonic extrapolations of diatonic scales that made his music so special. In short, "Charlie's Angels" kicks ass, and so does the album.