Pianist Stefano Battaglia, bassist Salvator Maiore, and drummer Roberto Dani have crafted a thing of such beauty here that words can only play catch-up. Rarely has a trio sounded so delicate yet unbreakable in its cohesion. Songways impresses at every turn—not only in the music (which pivots from philosophical to surreal at the push of a key, pluck of a string, or brush of a drumhead) but also in the setlist’s intellectual underpinnings, as each track takes clever inspiration from a variety of great writers, including Italo Calvino, Jonathan Swift, Charles Fourier, and Edgar Allan Poe.