"To me, music that breaks your heart is the music that stays with you forever," muses the best-selling jazz artist Chris Botti when talking about his new album, Italia. "It's one thing to be melancholy and one thing to be sophisticated, but when you get the two of them together in a way people can relate to, then I think you're on to something. You want the sophistication to lie in the purity of the sound, the beauty of the arrangements, and the quality of the performances."

With Italia, Botti has created a suite of songs and music inspired by the romance of Italy, each track conveying different aspects of that romance while the album flows with an overall conceptual integrity. Allowing his "love of slow moving orchestral pieces" to work through the album's arrangements, song choices, tone and melodic phrasing, Botti and his musicians have succeeded in conjuring an album of evocative atmospherics linking the worlds of jazz and pop and classical music.

Italia comes from a place Botti calls "the other kind of jazz," the muse-grid that inspired conceptually coherent works like Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain" and "Kind Of Blue." "They had an unbelievable amount of restraint put into the architecture," says Botti of those recordings. "There's not a lot of improvising on Italia, it's about the concept, the phrasing and how it's recorded. There's a lot of high wire act, almost classical trumpet playing on the album."

The songs on Italia are drawn from sources ranging from classical opera to the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. Recorded in the United States, England, and Italy, Italia is a brilliant showcase for Botti's musical versatility as performer, composer and collaborator. The album includes the newly-composed title track featuring the passionate vocals of renowned Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli as well as a new interpretation of "The Very Thought of You" with guest vocalist Paula Cole. "

In another of the album's duets, Botti and his ensemble accompany a vocal performance originally recorded in 1957 by the "forever cool" Dean Martin on "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face," a song first written for "My Fair Lady." "We recorded it in the same room he recorded it in with the same gear at Capitol Studios," Chris explains. "It sounds like we were all there in the same room. I'm very pleased with that track."

The album includes Botti's interpretation of "Ave Maria," a tune he often uses to open his concerts. "It works so beautifully," he says, "that I wanted to include it on my Italia record. For me, the way to break up my solos on the trumpet is to have a voice every once in a while, whether it's Dean Martin or Andrea Bocelli or Paula Cole. The entrance of the 60 piece choir coming in on 'Ave Maria' is such a beautiful departure."

On Italia, Botti re-imagines two beloved compositions -- "Deborah's Theme" (from "Once Upon A Time In America") and "Gabriel's Oboe" (from "The Mission") -- by the venerated Italian composer Ennio Morricone, recent recipient of an Honorary Academy Award® "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music."

Among the many treasures of Italia, Chris Botti creates a breathtaking new rendition of "Nessun Dorma" ("Let no one sleep") from the final act of Giacomo Puccini's opera "Turandot." The song entered popular consciousness in 1990, when it was adopted as the official theme of the Italia '90 World Cup.

"The real force on the album," Botti offers, "is 'Deborah's Theme,' 'The Mission,' 'It Never Entered My Mind,' 'Italia,' 'Nessun Dorma,' where the style of trumpet playing has more classical elements than a jazz musician in a club. We try to make every song have a different feel to it but the overall record has a flavor, a thread. I believe the challenge is to make a record that's individual, finds an audience, and creates something that's meaningful to the listener."