“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”
Gabriel García Márquez’s words from Living to Tell the Tale provide an evocative entry point into Ritornare, the forthcoming album from Sardinian saxophonist and clarinettist Enzo Favata and his long-running Atlantico quintet. More than a collection of compositions, the album feels like an act of musical remembrance — a return to places, sounds and cultural encounters that have shaped Favata and his collaborators over decades.
Formed in 1999, Atlantico has spent more than 25 years exploring the meeting points between Mediterranean traditions, Latin American influences and African musical heritage. At the same time, the group has developed a language that draws naturally from jazz, chamber music and improvisation, creating music that is difficult to categorize yet unmistakably rooted in the musicians' Southern Italian surroundings.
For Ritornare, Favata is joined by longtime guitarist Marcello Peghin, bandoneonist Daniel Di Bonaventura, double bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi. Together, they create an unusually rich acoustic sound world, one that reflects not only their individual musical histories but also the shared experiences accumulated through years of touring and musical exploration.
The album marks an important new chapter for Atlantico: Ritornare is Favata's first recording for ECM, and the collaboration with legendary producer Manfred Eicher brings another dimension to the quintet's sound. Recorded at Bavaria Studios in Munich in January 2026, the album allows the musicians considerable space to explore texture, atmosphere and the subtle interplay between composed passages and improvisation.
The name Atlantico itself suggests a journey across musical and cultural borders. Sardinia serves as the group's home base, but the band's musical imagination extends across the Atlantic toward South America and beyond. During their early years, extensive touring helped deepen those connections, turning geography into a kind of musical vocabulary.
African influences are present as well, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more subtly embedded within the group's rhythms and approach to improvisation. Rather than presenting these traditions as separate ingredients, Favata and his collaborators allow them to communicate with one another, creating a musical language built around movement, discovery and cultural memory.
That idea of memory is central to Ritornare. Favata, who was born in Alghero, Sardinia, in 1956, has long been fascinated by the cultural threads connecting distant places. His music often becomes a way of revisiting those experiences — returning to places not necessarily through geography, but through sound.
Literature has played an important role in that process. The work of writers such as Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez has influenced Favata's imagination as deeply as many of his musical predecessors. Their explorations of memory, history, identity and the blurred boundaries between reality and imagination find a natural parallel in Atlantico's music.
Favata describes the group's musical landscapes as places “suspended between dream and reality,” an idea that captures the distinctive atmosphere of Ritornare. There is something familiar in the music, but it is never completely recognizable. Melodies, rhythms and textures seem to lead the listener toward something known, only to reveal another layer just beyond it.
That sense of discovery is perhaps what makes Atlantico so compelling after all these years. The musicians are not simply revisiting the musical paths they have traveled before. Each return becomes an opportunity to discover something new.
The chemistry within the quintet is crucial. Favata and Peghin's decades-long collaboration provides a strong foundation, while Di Bonaventura's bandoneon adds an unmistakable connection to South American musical traditions. Maltana's double bass and Gandhi's drumming provide both subtle propulsion and spaciousness, allowing the music to breathe and evolve organically.
As Ritornare unfolds, these individual voices become part of a larger conversation. The album is less about showcasing individual virtuosity than about creating a collective atmosphere — one in which the musicians listen as closely as they play.
The result is an album that feels simultaneously rooted and nomadic. Sardinia is never far away, but neither are the sounds and memories gathered through decades of travel. Mediterranean traditions, jazz improvisation, chamber-like interaction and echoes of distant cultures coexist naturally, without feeling forced or overly conceptual.
For Atlantico, returning does not mean going backward. It means looking again, remembering differently and discovering new possibilities within familiar territory. On Ritornare, Enzo Favata and his longtime collaborators turn that idea into music, creating an intimate yet expansive journey through memory, place and imagination.
Recorded in Munich in January 2026 and produced by Manfred Eicher, Ritornare will be released by ECM on September 18, 2026. For listeners who appreciate jazz that exists comfortably between traditions and genres, it promises to be a particularly intriguing chapter in the remarkable story of Enzo Favata's Atlantico.
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