Canto General featuring Louis Moholo-Moholo – Rebel Flames (Ogun)

“OF all fires, love is the only inexhaustible one,” wrote the great poet of Chile Pablo Neruda, and human love expressed in music, as in this burning album Rebel Flames by the Italian band Canto General, crosses all frontiers.

Canto General was the title of Neruda’s 10th book of poems published in Mexico in 1950, a sequence of 15 “cantos,” including his most luminous, The Heights of Macchu Picchu.

But the Italian Canto General, pioneered by the trumpeter and activist born in Ruvo di Puglia in 1951, Pino Minafra, is quite an assembly of soundbreakers.

Minafra’s heartsblood is with the avant-garde. He was a founder member of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, the Min­Africa Orchestra and is dedicated to keep his music as close as possible to the “banda” popular tradition of local Italian bands.

The pianist is his son, also born in Ruvo di Puglia (in 1982), Livio Minafra, one of Italy’s prime young jazz virtuosi.

Roberto Ottaviano is the saxophonist, born in Bari in 1957 and who has played over the years with visiting giants from Dizzy Gillespie and Art Farmer to Mal Waldron and Paul Bley, and who has made many records as leader.

The man on bass is no stranger to England. Roberto Bellatalla lived and played in London for many years and was a member of the band Dreamtime, which included the Bristolian pianist Keith Tippett and the South African trumpeter Jim Dvorak.

And who is playing drums on this album, recorded in 2007 at a recital in Tivoli, near Rome, and at the Perpignan Jazz Festival?

No less a powerful percussionist than Louis Moholo-Moholo, born in Cape Town in 1940 and the drummer of the Blue Notes, who moved from apartheid South Africa in 1965 and created in exile a sonic storm of admiration and solidarity across the jazz scene of London.

The opening track is Livio’s Intro to a Song in which his comping piano and Ottaviano’s swooping alto saxophone palaver with an intensity which rises to a transcendant rapidity and beauty.

It segues into the first of

three Tippett compositions — A Song Excerpt from Frames, and as the album moves forward, you begin to recognise a kinship between Livio and the marvellous Bristolian pianist.

Moholo-Moholo’s indefatigable drums rap and clatter and transform the soundscape as if the horizon is all Africa, with Pino’s trumpet soaring in the air to find it.

Johannesburg-born and loved by Europe, Harry Miller was a bassist like no other, and a tunewriter too, and his Orange Grove with its hurrying pace shows the mettle of the horns.

Pino sprints like no other, Bolt-like and breathless through his muted solo with Louis’s crashing drums punctuating his notes and Ottaviano’s alto is even swifter, chasing Pino’s shadow.

Livio comes in with a Don Pullen-like succession of keyboard runs, and when the folksy theme returns the fivesome sound as if they’re back in a village, playing for a dance.

Louis’s alto confrere in the Blue Notes was Duddu Pukwana, and his ballad Angel Normali is serene and tender, with this time Ottaviano’s alto singing the melody with a moving power and Pino’s flugelhorn full of note-perfect audacity.

And it is during Livio’s solo in Tippett’s Thoughts to Geoff that the two pianists’ affinity seems most apparent, before Ottaviano comes spiralling in.

Bellatalla’s bass throbs beside Pino’s muted trumpet in Tippett’s tribute to the rebellious bass genius Dedicated to Mingus, and he excels too in the trumpeter’s all too brief Rebel Flames.

But the acme of the album is the quintet’s version of the tune by the Blue Notes trumpeter Mongezi Feza, You Ain’t Gonna Know Me Cos You Think You Know Me. Often played loud and robustly in a big band setting, this reading is quieter, slower and provocatively reflective about past lives and brilliance.

Bellatalla’s bass is dominant beside Ottaviano’s exquisite alto, Pino’s pellucid horn, Livio’s crystalline notes and Louis’s comradely drums. The sound pulsates with beauty.

Neruda said in his 1971 Nobel literature prize speech that the time would come that would “give light, justice and equality to all mankind. In this way the song would not have been sung in vain.” That song is here, all through this record.