These days, open­ing new CDs sent to me for review almost makes my heart hurt. The mar­ket for com­pact disks is small and get­ting smaller, and it seems like the same can be said of the mar­ket for recorded jazz. Regard­less of the music’s qual­ity (and much of it is very good), every new disc I hear is like a cry from an aban­doned child.

That feel­ing was espe­cially pro­nounced the other day as I opened a box of beau­ti­fully pack­aged CDs from Auand, an Ital­ian jazz label that’s been around for nearly a decade, but which I only recently dis­cov­ered. In a time when most music pack­ag­ing con­sists of lit­tle more than a down­loaded jpeg, Auand’s art­ful black & white pho­tog­ra­phy and ele­gant cover design stub­bornly denies the pass­ing of an era — just as its music rep­re­sents the vital­ity of con­tem­po­rary acoustic jazz, even as it bucks the for­mi­da­ble odds stacked against it. Over the next few days I’ll talk a bit about the releases Auand exec­u­tive pro­ducer Marco Valente was kind enough to send my way. Up first is Eco Fato by Quili­brì, a quin­tet led by the Ital­ian soprano sax­o­phon­ist Andrea Ayassot.

Quilibrì‘s unusual lineup fea­tures Ayas­sot, gui­tarist Karsten Lipp, acoustic bassist Ste­fano Risso, and per­cus­sion­ists Adri­ano De Micco and Luca Spena. The band plays a self-contained yet emo­tion­ally expres­sive fusion of jazz and var­i­ous world musics. A use­ful if inex­act par­al­lel to Quilibrì‘s sound is the work of the group Ore­gon. Lipp’s finger-picked acoustic gui­tar estab­lishes the sort of pas­toral har­monic back­drop that Ralph Towner’s once did with the Amer­i­can band. Like Ore­gon (and its pre­cur­sor, the Paul Win­ter Con­sort) Quili­brì sur­veys a vari­ety of musi­cal dialects, from fla­menco to samba to North African idioms (if I had to do it again I’d’ve been an eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gist; as it is, I’m stuck to describe the music as accu­rately as it deserves).

Though the rhythm sec­tion plays with great feel­ing and skill, the group’s guid­ing light is Ayas­sot, com­poser of the nine tunes and chief soloist. Ayas­sot plays with a dry, lightly inflected tone, mostly free of vibrato. His lines are spar­ingly yet pre­cisely artic­u­lated, melodic and rhyth­mic in the man­ner of Stan Getz. Indeed, the project seems a bit like a 21^st cen­tury updat­ing of Getz’s work with Joao Gilberto and Char­lie Byrd from the early 1960s, albeit with a much greater empha­sis on con­tra­pun­tal inter­ac­tiv­ity. Ayas­sot and Lipp related closely to one another in the course of their impro­vi­sa­tions, as do Risso and the per­cus­sion­ists. In gen­eral, the pas­sions are sub­tle — they smol­der rather than burn — but the music is no less affect­ing for it.

Next up: sax­o­phon­ist Emanuele Cisi’s The Age of Numbers.