Some critics call Enrico Rava Europe’s most accomplished jazz trumpeter, but that kind of ranking is always up for debate. After spending an hour on the phone with the voluble Italian, however, I’m quite willing to testify that he may well be the continent’s biggest jazz fan.

“My main occupation is listening to records, and then I also play trumpet,” the 69-year-old musician contends. “I have thousands and thousands of records, and I love the whole history of jazz. I think I have every possible [Louis] Armstrong record, from the very beginning, when he was playing with blues singers, through to the ’60s. And I have everything that exists of Bix Beiderbecke. And that’s funny, you know, because I am a modern musician, but I could listen to Armstrong or Bix or Frankie Trumbauer and never get tired.”

The Straight has reached Rava in Positano, a scenic town on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. He’s enjoying a few days’ vacation, but he has still brought along some of his favourite discs.

“I have Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings, Miles Davis with Gil Evans, a couple of [Thelonious] Monk’s—those are records that travel with me all the time, and I never get tired of listening to them,” he says.

The late Whitney Balliett once defined jazz as “the sound of surprise”, and that’s exactly what Rava keeps discovering in music he knows so well that it’s almost ingrained in his DNA. It’s also at the heart of his partnership with pianist Stefano Bollani, his regular accompanist in both duo and ensemble settings since 2001.

“We have such an amazing telepathic rapport that we never know what we are going to play, you know,” Rava reports of his 36-year-old colleague. “Maybe one second before the concert we decide what we’ll start with, the very first tune. And then we might play standards, or we might only improvise, or we might get into some of my tunes. We might play some Italian songs or some Brazilian songs—it all depends what kind of audience we get, and the acoustics of the room.”

There are some songs the two won’t play, however, and oddly enough they’re Bollani originals.

“He’s written some beautiful tunes, but mostly we don’t play them because he tends to write very complicated music, and that’s not exactly where I play my best,” says the trumpeter, with just a hint of regret. “I need simple things. As soon as I start having a piece of paper in front of me, I must concentrate on that, and then I don’t feel free.”

The Enrico Rava/Stefano Bollani Duo plays the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Friday (July 3).