jazz in Italy

In Italy jazz is an object of serious study and practice, aspiration and envy, emulation and celebration, creativity and commercial draw. So I found last week at the Siena Jazz Summer Workshop and Tuscia in Jazz fest in Soriano nel Cimino.

At both sites there were top-notch players of several generations from the US teaching young acolytes, offering life lessons a step or two beyond the fundamental mastery of instruments. Specially convened ensembles mixing players of diverse experience from multiple countries caught the attentions of all-ages audiences at free performances held in medieval courtyards and town squares. Posters on the ancient walls of hilltop villages such as Montalcino, producer of some of Italy's finest wines, heralded jazz concert series I'd missed, featuring local as well as international headliners.

There's something happenin' here, no doubt about it. The harvesting of interests planted decades (centuries?) ago in the creation and appreciation of a world-wide vernacular music emphasizing melodic improvisation and rhythmic engagement? The emergence of a sophisticated but not elitist or exclusionary audience? Cultural evolution proceeding in the context of traditions dating back to pre-Renaissance? All of the above, fine cuisine and sweeping belvederes, too? A long report follows.

Invited by Francesco Martinelli, Siena's distinguished Jazz Archives curator and history professor (as well as a jazz journalist and festival organizer) to present topics from my book Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz as the first lecture to a class of some 50 young people in for a two-week intensive, I met, dined with and heard performances by faculty including alto saxophonist Bobby Watson, drummer John Riley, trumpeter Avishai Cohen, pianist Aaron Goldberg, guitarists Peter Bernstein and Ben Monder, pianist John Taylor, tenorist Joel Frahm, saxophonist-composer Claudio Fasoli, bassist Paolino Dalla Porta and French writer Thierry Quenum.

Thierry lectured on "European Jazz After 1960," making the interesting point that the burgeoning capitols of the European Union may now be comparable to New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago and New York in the 1920s for generating their own regional scenes and substyles which give rise to distinct individualists who are also coming into productive collaborations with each other.
 
He believes there is a new "European" way of playing that's come into being, though he won't typify it by any particular characteristics, other than that EU musicians no longer feeling any need to imitate the ways Americans play. I don't know about that; If I could discern any EU music-making direction, it struck me as consistent with long-standing clichés about UK and Continental jazz: that there's less interest in hard-driving swing or intense blues derivations, more tendency towards lyricism, abstraction and/or serenity than explosive excitement, conflict or competition. But I went to Italy to explore, not pontificate, and I did encounter exceptions to those clichés.
 
Complete on  >>  http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2010/08/jazz_in_italy.html