But what a character! Diavola’s ten songs offer a cold-eyed, but hot-blooded look at love in all its triumphs and traps, its transporting magic and its terrors. It’s the aural equivalent of a blood-and-truth Italian Neorealist script as directed by Fellini.
That’s more than apt for the second-generation American singer whose family still lives in Cerisano, a hill town in the southern Italian province of Calabria. “It’s very beautiful,” she said. “It feels like it’s been there for ages, which it has.”
Though she grew up in “sunny, happy Escondido, California,” Cavassa admits that “as I grew and moved away, I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with–and comforted by–darkness and the creativity and peace that that that holds for me.”
There may be no better place to find that combination of darkness and light than the city where Cavassa now lives. “What I like about New Orleans,” she said, is that “they’re really able to hold both. They celebrate life the same way they celebrate death, and they really know how to celebrate both.”
NOLA was where an everyday wedding gig changed the arc of Cavassa’s career. “it was a last-minute gig, and we were just having fun. I didn’t even know that Ann Marie [Wilkins] was watching, but the next morning I woke up to several missed calls from someone who said they were Joshua Redman’s manager. I didn’t think anything would come of this. Two weeks later, Josh called me and we had a conversation and he said, ‘Well, would you like to make a record?’ And I was like, “Yes.” So we did.”
That record was where are we, the saxophonist’s 2023 Blue Note debut, which was recorded, appropriately enough, in New Orleans. On it, Cavassa was just one among a stellar cast of musicians that included drummer Brian Blade and trumpeter Nicholas Payton, both Louisianians, and became part of the saxophonist’s touring band.
Sideman is an odd position for a singer to be in, but Cavassa regards it as a privilege. “It was so great to be able to learn from Josh, learn from the road, learn about how to tour and how to function, how to band-lead, you know, all these things that I would just be able to observe as opposed to being thrust into them [as a leader],” she said.
Touring to support the release last week of Diavola, Cavassa is now in charge, and leading like-minded musicians: Gabriel Schneider on guitar, bassist Lex Warshawsky and the empathic drummer Kyle Poole.
Together they’ll recreate the haunted magic of Diavola, a record that at times rises to an almost operatic intensity. Fittingly, Cavassa has lately become immersed in Bizet’s “Carmen,” an opera about a doomed love triangle. And one of the highlights of the album is an eerie reading, almost a mad-scene aria, of Mario Lanza’s 1950 hit “Be My Love,” a song she loves.
But don’t expect Cavassa to sing it the way the beloved tenor did. Though the openhearted passion of the beloved tenor is very much present, Cavassa add a tint of the Diavola’s doomy obsession.
Gabrielle Cavassa, Thursday, May 7, 7 p.m., Edwin’s Leadership & Restaurant Institute, 12383 Cedar Rd, Cleveland Heights, tickets available here.
For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.
