Terry/Lacy/Rava

In the photo (from left) Lilian Terry, Steve Lacy and Enrico Rava at the American Academy in Rome in 1966.

Lilian Terry was an Italian jazz singer and presenter of RAI television and radio programs. After obtaining a diploma in piano at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Lilian Terry collaborated, between the fifties and sixties, with Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Romano Mussolini, Dizzy Gillespie, Tommy Flanagan and others. Furthermore, in the Seventies the singer opened the way to musical education dedicated to jazz in Italy by founding the Dizzy Gillespie Popular School of Music, near Bassano del Grappa (Veneto).

(Lillian Terry è autrice del libro “Dizzy, Duke, Brother Ray, and Friends: On and Off the Record with Jazz Greats” (University of Illinois Press – 2017).

The trumpeter Enrico Rava in the mid-sixties he moved to Rome where he stayed in an apartment on Via Sistina. In 1966, together with the American saxophonist Steve Lacy, he left for Argentina, where the two recorded the seminal free jazz album "The Forest and the Zoo" in Buenos Aires. After a year in the South American country, Enrico Rava moved to New York, where he came into contact with the exponents of the American avant-garde, the trumpeter Don Cherry and the trombonist Roswell Rudd, collaborating with the “Jazz Composers Orchestra” of trumpeter Mike Mantler and composer and pianist Carla Bley. In the same period he participated in the recording of the album "Escalator over the Hill", created by Carla Bley together with the writer Paul Haines.

Contribution shared by Enrico Rava