Frère Jacques: Round About OffenbachECM

In the past decade the Italian duo of clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi and accordionist Gianni Coscia have created their own genre, a delicious blend of jazz and Mediterranean cafe music with flavourings of tango and kelzmer. With it they have excavated a tradition of European song that is at least as old and venerable as jazz itself. Fiorenzo Carpi and Kurt Weill have already been given the “Round About” treatment. This time it’s Jacques Offenbach, composer of the famous can-can tune, among much else. Taking Offenbach’s frothy melodies as a starting point, Trovesi and Coscia swap ideas like the old friends they are, reaching uncanny levels of empathy as the tunes dissolve into a joyously improvised confection. At once playful and profound (with liner notes to match by none other than Umberto Eco), it’s the sort of music for which the word delightful was intended. See ecmrecords.com