| Jazz |
Composer and trombonist Michael Dease recently offered a telling remark about Margherita Fava: “Margherita is an exceptional and positive presence within her ensembles and her environment, which has undeniably contributed to her growth as a young player to watch.” It is a neat summation, but it only scratches the surface of what makes her new album, Murrina, so intriguing.
What becomes evident immediately is that Fava’s strongest gift lies not just in her playing but in her ability to compose. From the opening track, she lays out a musical landscape that is at once personal and demanding. The jazz foundation is firm, but her classical influences are just as prominent. This is music that draws on 19th- and early 20th-century traditions, dense with harmonic richness and dramatic gesture. The listener hears echoes of Tchaikovsky’s power, Wagner’s restless defiance, and the sweep of high Romanticism, all of it refracted through a thoroughly contemporary jazz sensibility. If there is a flaw, it is that the music can feel almost too full, with little room to breathe. But that is a minor reservation in an album that otherwise proves captivating from start to finish. Even the cover art seems to announce this intent: a visual extension of a sound world that is simultaneously historical and modern.
Fava’s background helps explain how she arrived here. Born in Italy into a family of musicians who specialized in the baroque repertoire, she grew up steeped in tradition but never confined by it. She began on piano at age 10, moved to electric bass as a teenager, and by 17 was studying jazz at a summer program in Venice, New York, run by the New School. There, she had a pivotal experience: teaching herself, by ear, Miles Davis’s solo on “So What.” Like many before her, she describes it as a turning point that redefined her sense of what music could be.
Talk to jazz musicians from almost any background, and one name eventually surfaces: Miles. Increasingly, younger artists add Joe Zawinul or Wayne Shorter to that list. It is no accident. These were musicians with monumental personalities and bodies of work that continue to shape how new generations find their voice. Fava is no exception, and nowhere is this clearer than on “Yan,” the album’s most revelatory track. In contrast to the denser arrangements elsewhere, “Yan” pares things back to the essentials: a piano trio with bass and drums. That restraint gives Fava room to reveal her artistry in full. The lines are direct, the structure unclouded, the phrasing sharp and lyrical. It is in this piece that her skills as both pianist and composer are most apparent, and it leaves little doubt about her potential.
Murrina ultimately feels like an album in two parts. “Yan” sits in the middle like a hinge. The first half establishes Fava’s aesthetic terrain; the second half is where she takes greater risks, loosens the textures, and embraces more adventurous choices. The results are striking. By the end of the record, the sense is less of a debut than of a statement of intent, the beginning of a trajectory that promises more.
If her progress continues, Margherita Fava may well emerge as one of the defining composers of her generation. Murrina is not just a strong first step. It is the sound of an artist laying the foundations of a voice that is still forming, but already commanding attention.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 13th 2025
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Musicians :
Margherita Fava: piano, compositions, arrangements
Brandon Rose: upright and electric bass
Jonathan Barber: drums
Bob Reynolds: tenor saxophone
Taber Gable: synths
Jef Babko: synths and editing
Recorded at Stone Soup Studios in Maumee, OH by Eric Sills
Mixing and mastering by Chris Allen
Artwork by Margherita Fava
Track Listing :
No Clue
Keep On
Intermezzo, Op. 117 No1
Murrina
Satin Dol
Yarn
Murrina reprise
Foreshadow
Alter Ego