RITORNARE, Enzo Favata's First ECM Recording, to Arrive via ATLANTICO Quintet
Guitarist Marcello Peghin and bandoneonist Daniel Di Bonaventura join Favata on the ECM album.
Sardinian saxophonist and clarinettist Enzo Favata is set to release RITORNARE, his first recording for ECM, featuring his long-running ATLANTICO quintet. The album brings together guitarist Marcello Peghin, bandoneonist Daniel Di Bonaventura, double bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi, continuing a musical partnership that began when the group formed in 1999. Produced by Manfred Eicher, RITORNARE finds the quintet exploring an acoustic sound shaped by Mediterranean, Latin American and African musical traditions.
Since its formation in 1999, Enzo Favata's Atlantico quintet has explored a musical space where Mediterranean roots, Latin American echoes and African influences merge. Probing the musical space where jazz, chamber music dynamics and improvisation meet, the group, never predictable, proves to have a strong sense of direction grounded in vast musical backgrounds, including the traditional southern musical dialects that surround them in Southern Italy and around the Mediterranean. Led by Sardinian saxophonist and clarinettist Enzo Favata, with long-time collaborator Marcello Peghin on guitar, bandoneonist Daniel Di Bonaventura, double bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi, on RITORNARE – Favata's first recording for ECM – the group creates a richly coloured acoustic sound world as they have never before, shaped by shared travels and investigations into multiple musical cultures, as well as the in-depth collaboration with producer Manfred Eicher in the studio.
Favata and guitarist Marcello Peghin are connected through decades of close collaboration in their Southern Italian environment, bandoneonist Daniel Di Bonaventura, double bass player Salvatore Maltana and drummer UT Gandhi their natural partners and compatriots. Rather modus operandi than broad geographical classification, the group's name points toward the large idiomatic bridges that are crossed musically on travels from Sardinia, the musicians' home base, to South America, to where extended touring spells took the quintet in its early days. All About Jazz has said, 'in Favata's world, and like all great groups, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' – a statement that couldn't be more appropriate than here. African roots are implied, as are the improvisational aspects natural to dealing with musical journeys this spaciously vast yet, from a historical perspective, so closely intertwined.
A collective cultural memory connects the places and people whose paths are linked around the Atlantic. Memories sculpted from past literary triumphs, achievements in the fine arts, lores of peoples in the constant process of change and their shared remembrance of events that have come to pass, creating a reconfigured status quo. Saxophonist and clarinettist Enzo Favata, born in Alghero, Sardinia in 1956, has long been enthralled with the abundance of threads that fashion this wide-flung web. In music, he re-discovers the places he has visited from memory, returning ('ritornare') to them through sound.
Favata, as his like-minded fellow travellers in the band, recognises this cultural confluence in the writing of Latin-American authors Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez, among others; Literary references as influential to the reedsman as any musical precursors. In their soft-spoken acoustic landscapes, Atlantico aspire to create places 'suspended between dream and reality', says Favata – Magical Realism reigns strong in the group's guiding spirit.
Here and now, several decades after they first found each other, Favata and his cohorts create dialogues within structures and atmospheres that, at first glance, seem strangely familiar yet offer new details at each repeated glimpse — the listener is slowly but steadily removed from what they thought they recognised, returning to a place that feels reassuring yet unknown. And each time the musicians try to trace their steps, they end up at a new place, returning to where they haven't quite yet been.
The album was recorded at Bavaria Studios, Munich in January 2026 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
Album Details
Enzo Favata · RITORNARE
ECM · Release Date: September 18, 2026
For more information, visit ECMRecords.com
The ATLANTICO quintet's work has long drawn on the members' shared history in Southern Italy alongside extended travels through South America, influences that inform the group's approach to jazz, chamber music and improvisation on RITORNARE.
