Edoardo Marraffa has spent the last ten years immersing himself in Italy's musical avant garde, and has become the ideal "free jazz" musician. He is not screechingly pretentious, though he certainly can make noise; neither is he a false messiah, exalting the listener's role in music or proclaiming the death of old melodic structures. Instead, Marraffa is a wandering thinker in a communal art form. He wants to discover an unknown aspect of living, or just an aspect of his profession (which is his life), within a quandary of notes.

He starts off, in the typical but necessary fashion of experimentalists, by scaring the listener's natural, ingrown conservatism away. Hear the trumpeted shrieks of "Eccoti" boom like the soundtrack to Maus (Art Spiegelman's Holocaust comic book in which mice are the victims and cats are the aggressors), and your mouth just falls open. To hear a tenor saxophone -- to hear anything! -- writhe like a bludgeoned animal is horrifying. It begs the question: do our ears beat madly to anything new or foreign to them -- even torture?

Then, with point made and listeners' ears at full attention, Solo eases away from a mad fall towards death, and from the sort of rhythmic yelping that Pere Ubu's David Thomas might envy. There proceeds, from the second composition onward, a random coordination of slow, kind-of-blue jazz and industrial, kind-of-black noise, and I guess this means a couple of things. One, Marraffa is not about escaping from the jazz classics of yesterday, and two, it's as if the entire record were done during a single 45-minute session. I'd compare it to a Jack Kerouac novel I read, which was all about drinking and climbing a mountain. Like that book, Solo annoys a little because it lapses into repetitions of the artist's most immediate thoughts -- far worse than a catchy, well-crafted chorus -- but it's also fascinating, because you care a bit about them. The ideas have weight. They seem worth deciphering -- or, at the very least, worth inflating into something grandiose.

If it happens to be the latter, so what? Worse things happen in life than being moved beyond an artist's dreams. In compositions like "Marrafoufou" and "Dudu", Marraffa seems worried about his entire process, as if he's afraid it's taking him nowhere. In his desperation to climb out of it into the genius he has worked within reach, we hear him belch, shake off fits and step on his tenor sax as if he's holding down a brimming flow of lava. When you're there as a listener, standing above the volcano with the artist and staring down death, there's no fucking point in searching your pockets for an avant garde bullshit detector. Just enjoy this blissful trip. Fewer juxtapositions between the peaceful and chaotic might have given Solo more power, but this remains a strong statement. Taken note by note and minute by minute, Solo stands as daring and adventurous as any individual work from Mario Lavone or Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Hopefully it's only Marraffa's first of many screams.