RITORNARE: Enzo Favata's Debut ECM Recording
The Sardinian bandleader's ATLANTICO quintet creates a richly colored acoustic sound world shaped by shared travels across multiple musical cultures.
Sardinian saxophonist and clarinettist Enzo Favata is set to release RITORNARE, his first recording for ECM, featuring his long-running ATLANTICO quintet. Since its formation in 1999, the group has explored a musical space where Mediterranean roots, Latin American echoes and African influences merge, probing the space where jazz, chamber music dynamics and improvisation meet.
Favata is joined on the recording by long-time collaborator Marcello Peghin on guitar, bandoneonist Daniel Di Bonaventura, double bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi. On RITORNARE, 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 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, with bandoneonist Daniel Di Bonaventura, double bass player Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. 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, where extended touring spells took the quintet in its early days.
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
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