Blood and Champagne album review

Milan-born saxophonist Tommaso Starace  has been resident in the UK since studying at  the Birmingham Conservatoire and the  Guildhall in the 1990s, and his ebullient,  tumbling alto and passionate soprano are  backed on this, his fourth album as a leader,  by a top-rank trio of UK-based players:  pianist Frank Harrison, electric bassist  Laurence Cottle and drummer Chris  Nickolls.     Starace himself has an abiding interest in  mid-20th-century history (the title of this  album nods to Hungarian photographer/photojournalist Robert Capa via the  biography of the Magnum co-founder by Alex Kershaw), and his sound and  approach (the declamatory fierceness of his alto often calls Sonny Criss or  Jackie McLean to mind) are well suited to dramatising particular events.  Accordingly, the album's opener, 'Il Tunnel della Libertà', inspired by the rescue  of dozens of East Berliners by means of a 165-metre tunnel dug in 1962 by two  Italian students, 'immediately sets a mood takes the audience on a journey,  creating vivid images in their minds' (Starace's words), and the set's non-  originals, whether overtly jazz-based (Michel Petrucciani's 'Even Mice Dance',  Billy Strayhorn's 'Johnny Come Lately') or actual movie themes (Henry  Mancini's Oscar-winning 'Days of Wine and Roses'), are also vibrantly  evocative.    In Harrison, of course, Starace has a fluent and graceful pianist well used to  complementing passion and fire (he is a regular member of Gilad Atzmon's  band), and the powerful but subtle rhythm team of Nickolls and Cottle (the latter  tunefully propulsive as ever) perform flawlessly throughout; the title Blood &  Champagne, conjuring up as it does life's intoxicating intensity, is well chosen:  this is a heady, exuberant but affecting album.