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TWO SIDES OF FREEDOM
CARLO ACTIS DATO AND ERIC ZINMAN


Italian saxophonist Carlo Actis Dato made his long-overdue Boston debut a week ago Tuesday at the International Society’s Tremont Theatre on a double bill with the Boston-based Eric Zinman trio. Dato is one of Italy’s premier reed players, a pioneer of a distinctly Italian style of free jazz. His music — a high-energy fusion of Italian folk music, folk music from other countries, and American jazz — merges dance rhythms, folk melodies, and sound abstraction with on-stage theatrics. It’s boisterous and fun and in your face.

Dato played solo, and each of the individual pieces had a sharply defined personality. None overstayed its welcome, each one was focused and to the point. He opened on baritone saxophone, which may be the strongest of his horns, filling the room with a torrent of notes that vacillated between a clear sweet upper register and a darker, raspier bottom end. The sonic onslaught eventually resolved into a folk-dance melody that surged onward with a crazed, dervish energy. "Pollo Fume" ("Smoked Chicken"), which he played on bass clarinet, was similarly propulsive, with the hyperactive dance theme interrupted by the bass clarinet’s vocal cries and chicken clucks. Dato’s tenor on "Mambo #55" had a hoarse, urgent edge, and he amplified the mambo’s rhythmic intensity with sharp, staccato riffs and abstract pops and clicks. On another baritone piece, he sang into the horn to create eerie chords that sounded like a Tuvan throat singer on steroids. And during another bass-clarinet piece, he disassembled the horn section by section while maintaining a delirious North African–flavored dance melody.

Boston trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum joined Dato for four improvised duets that found lots of common ground between Bynum’s American jazzy swing and Dato’s European dances. Their tones blended exceptionally well, especially when Bynum pulled out a conch shell to accompany Dato’s baritone.

Although they speak the same musical language — free jazz — the introspective opening set by pianist Eric Zinman and his trio with bassist John Voigt and drummer Lawrence Cook couldn’t have presented a greater contrast to the extroverted Dato. But it was a lovely, close-knit hour of totally improvised music. Zinman’s use of the damper pedal surrounds his lines with a halo of overtones; even his most sharply hit notes have a soft edge. There was a relaxed give and take within the band as Zinman interwove oblique melodies, which often spanned the whole length of the keyboard, with Voigt’s cannily placed bass notes and Cook’s textural drumming. Their music has the kind of intimacy and confidence that comes from long experience together.

BY ED HAZELL

Issue Date: February 21 - 28, 2002
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