Enrico Pieranunzi, Marc Johnson, Joey Baron - Just Beyond The Horizon

Pieranunzi is a major discovery as both a pianist and arranger, and the scores of Rota and Morricone are a vast, fertile, virgin territory for jazz improvisers. Morricone is best known in popular culture for his twangy soundtracks to Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns." But his voluminous body of work (over 400 film scores) contains music of melodic richness and fresh, evocative sonorities and hovering atmospheres. Pieranunzi actually played on some of the original soundtracks, and his lush, dramatic lyricism here is an inspired jazz response to Morricone's cinematic soundscapes. Johnson, in the extravagant romanticism of his bass solos, sounds like he could be a closet Italian.