Ron Horton featuring Antonio Zambrini
It’s a Gadget World.
BMI. 2009.
Ron Horton, trumpet.
Antonio Zambrini, piano.
Ben Allison, Bass
Tony Moreno, Drums.
Ron Horton’s lyrical trumpet playing is in large part responsible for the serious undertones that anchor the playful flavor of Ben Allison’s recent recordings with his latest band of “downtown” Manhattan players, Man Sized Safe. Horton center s the soundscape, so to speak, where ever he shows up. A noted member of New York’s Jazz Composers Collective, Horton has just released It’s a Gadget World, his fourth solo effort. The new CD features Italian pianist Antonia Zambrini as virtually a co-artist; he penned four of the nine compositions and provides elegant accompaniment throughout the set. My only direct, as in “live,” experience of great Italian jazz pianists is Renato Sellani, whose operatic trio I once experienced at a midnight concert under the stars in a castle courtyard in Cortona. It was there I learned how BIG Italian jazz can be.
It is a style of playing that is florid if not fulsome, and it tends to demand attention, consume focus. Piano and trumpet on this disk are therefore interestingly at odds with one another. Zambrini plays soft as Bill Evans or big as Sellani, every instant open and ready for drama, should the opportunity appear. It’s risky: bathos (reaching and not grasping) can really hang you up, but because Horton on the horn is always already doing the same thing, working the material toward the large gesture, the unabashedly expressive figure attained at almost any cost, It’s a Gadget World pulls it off. With the help of Ben Allison and Tony Moreno on bass and drums, Horton and Zambrini aim for pathos—and nail it, “big” time.
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