Search - Enrico Rava & Ran Blake :: Duo En Noir

Hearing how beautifully pianist Ran Blake and trumpeter Enrico Rava play Nat "King" Cole's "Nature Boy," it's hard to believe Blake's liner note calling the performance "pessimistic." A celebration of film noir moods and themes, Duo en Noir is a strangely warm, sonorous, flowing set of spare piano and trumpet performances that Blake sees centered on sinister subjects--hence the pessimism of "Nature Boy." It's noir, sure, but even so, it's hard to hear hauntedness in Rava's midrange "Certi angoli," which creates an airy tension that begs for more listening, not a feeling that's particularly ghoulish. Even Bernard Herrmann's "Vertigo/Laura" comes off as lyrical and touching. And "There's No You" is unabashedly romantic balladry at its finest. So, too, is Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," which Blake describes as "traveling through a hallucination of jet lag with an uncertainty of tomorrow's future." Perhaps it's just that Blake loves complicated emotional states as much as favors complex harmonic subtleties, because throughout Duo en Noir, what one hears is lovely music, always rich with Blake's off-kilter harmonic sense but still lovely. --Andrew Bartlett