It’s unusual nowadays for a jazz band to sound like they’re from anywhere in particular. Mostly, they sound as unrooted to place as the lobby of a chain hotel. Italy’s Guarino Savoldelli Quintet fly in the face of that bland cosmopolitanism. The vocal melodies are rooted in the half-Byzantine modes of Southern Italy, and the enchantment is woven into the band’s hard bop. Saxophonist-clarinetist Guido Bombardieri catches that twilight-in-Tunisia sound in his fierce solos. Some of the tracks are folkloric in origin, their authors anonymous buskers from centuries ago.
