“I might have jumped out the window—but through jazz I found what to do with my life.”
When Enrico Rava recorded The Song Is You (ECM), his new album of duets with pianist Fred Hersch, in Lugano, Switzerland, he was just out of the hospital. “I had a very heavy operation. It was a cancer of the lung,” the 83-year-old trumpeter explains from his home in Chiavari, Italy. “Fortunately it was very small, so they took it off and everything is clean. I didn’t have to do any kind of therapy or anything.” Even so, it was a serious procedure, and Italy’s most prominent jazz musician fretted that he might not be up to playing his horn.
“I had already prepared a speech,” he says. “I would
