Cover Story

Santa goes through windows here

New Years (and UmbriaJazz Winter) in Orvieto

By Roger Atkinson

It's one of those things you had to know about to be here.

Every year, all the jazz magazines do their Jazz Festival issue. You'll see all of the major festivals listed, like North Sea and Montreux. There are the less famous, also, the little weekend festivals around the states and elsewhere, too.

One that I always wanted to attend is in Perugia , Italy , in July. Perugia is in the Umbria region, in the beautiful central part of the country. South of Perugia is a smaller town built on top of a hill called Orvieto. Orvieto is famous for its wines and olive oils, and is also the home of UmbriaJazz Winter. You won't find it listed in the magazines, and unlike the big summer festivals you don't see the travel agent advertisements. As I said, you have to know about it.

Four years ago Gail and I came to Italy with an alumni group from Wofford College , and we stayed in Orvieto. From Orvieto, it is an easy bus trip to Rome , Florence , Assisi , and Perugia , making it a good choice for a group. We noticed the little signs in all of the shops saying “UmbriaJazz Winter”, and made note of its long history (it is now in its fifteenth year). One restaurant was decorated with photographs from prior festivals; to me, it quickly became the hippest restaurant on the planet.

We knew then that we'd come back.

Getting Ready
Getting information about the festival could have been easier. The UmbriaJazz Web site noted the dates, but there were no listings of performances when we looked into it in October. There were no links to agencies to help with hotel bookings, either. Travelocity got us some hotel names, but came back as “unavailable”. But the names helped, enabling us to find their Web sites and from there, contact information. Three hotels responded positively about room availability, including the Aquila Bianca, the small hotel we stayed in four years ago.

Once you get the hotel, it's easy. Book the flights to Rome , then wait until they announce the performing artists.

The UmbriaJazz Web site finally posted the schedule in mid November, and had a link to what looks like an Italian version of Ticket Master, called Green Ticket. As each performance has separate admission, we purchased tickets for an event on each of the five days, December 28 until January 1. With confirmations in hand, we were ready to move!

Travel
Getting anywhere over the Christmas and New Year holidays can be an adventure; you just come to expect it. We were lucky; all flights were essentially on time. Once we were in Rome , we were pleased that there were no transit strikes. It was easy to take a subway to the main train station (Roma Termini) to get our train to Orvieto. It's an hour trip to Orvieto, as we are just 100 kilometers north of Rome . The train station is in Orvieto Scala, which is at the bottom of the cliffs of Orvieto, and while we could have taken a bus or the Funicular (a small train that runs up and down the hill) into Orvieto, a taxi seemed best after the long day and night of travel.

Orvieto
I can't imagine a part of the world as picture perfect as Orvieto. It is a medieval town of about 10,000 people, sitting on the top of a flattened hill. The hill provided protection from predators, as it was near impossible to attack the city before modern times. As attackers would try to climb the cliffs, they would be welcomed with boiling olive oil poured down over the walls that protect the city. It was safe enough that it was considered ideal for the Pope when the Vatican was under siege.

Just about the whole city is preserved. There is a magnificent Duomo dating back to the 1200's. Streets of brick wind through the city (you can only see about a half block ahead (another feature making Orvieto difficult to attack). Its streets are lined with merchants selling mainly regional products, from clothing to food and wine to a variety of arts and crafts; ceramics are especially featured. There are restaurants and bars everywhere; you don't have to be hungry or sober while you are here! Like much of Europe , the shops are open in the mornings, and close for several hours in the afternoon before reopening until the early evening.

Being a smaller city, you can't count on merchants or restaurant staff to speak English. But it's really not too intimidating, and hence hunger or sobriety was never a problem!

The whole town is maybe a mile from end to end. Over the course of a week, you should be able to see it all, but you'll never be able to try all of the cuisine or bars!

Then there is the magnificent Teatro Mancinelli, where the main concert is held every day. Like our Folly, it is a true showpiece, and is the busy performance center for the town all year long, with all kinds of music, ballet, and plays. Built in 1844, it is one of the newer structures in town! The theatre itself does not have extensive floor space, about twenty five rows, but there are five layers of twenty one boxes in a horseshoe (that is 105 in all) that are incredibly close to the stage.

There are also art museums, palaces, and Etruscan ruins. The residential areas remind one of a crowded city, with small units one on top of the other. But peer behind a gate and you'll see beautiful courtyards.

You can walk the perimeter of the city in under an hour and see the Umbrian countryside – farms, vineyards, olive groves, small towns, and even some light industry and quarry operations. It will take quite a few visits to tire of these views. We've only seen them in December and January; I can only imagine what spring looks like from here.

And the food and wine are just magnificent. The restaurants range from informal pizzerias (my goodness were these good!) to more formal Italian. They very much emphasize the local produce (you'll see the chefs purchasing fresh meat, fish, cheeses, fruits, and vegetables at the farmer's market every Saturday), and all the pasta is homemade. I've never had better oranges, anywhere, than the ones from southern Italy . And did I mention the wine? Red or white, it was unlike what we can buy here from this region; the best does not get exported. It is not expensive, either.

It's a different world, almost like what Disney might try to create, but with a twist: it's real.

The Festival
There is music daily from around noon until 2:00 a.m. or later, and it is fairly constant. There are two main venues, the Mancinelli and a large room at the Palazzo del Popolo (People's Palace), which is now used as a convention facility; each has several concerts daily. This year, Italian trumpet great Enrico Rava and Joe Lovano were the featured artists, their multiple concerts were on these stages. The Palazzo del Popolo also had two other rooms, a smaller basement room that was Dr. Lonnie Smith's home for the festival (he did a set or two daily here with his trio), and a second informal room next to a makeshift food and beverage tent where you could relax and listen for awhile. There was another room in the Palazzo dei Sette, a building on the “main drag” with a great clock tower,

where you could grab food and drink and listen to a set for a nominal charge; this was open all day. There were sessions at a library and a museum, and a gospel concert at the Duomo. Twice a day there was a street parade that was just wild. Plus, a couple of restaurants had “official” festival shows a couple of times a day, and many others had their own jazz sets. There was also an outside New Year's concert right after midnight , with two bands that kept it jumping until near four in the morning.

Add it all together, and you had many choices, and a few ways that you could approach the festival. There was no possible way to see it all, as this was all simultaneous.

It was also all within easy walking distances from the hotels, never more than five minutes unless the crowds slowed you down.

Musical highlights
Enrico Rava was a familiar name to us, but we had heard little of his music before the festival. He had four separate concerts here, three with different quintets and another duo performance with pianist Stefano Bollani. We heard two of the quintet performances. Rava seemed to use the pre- Bitches Brew Miles Davis as a jumping off point for his explorations. He has an exquisite Milesian tone, his pushed his bands into a lot of interplay, and the bands were both fine. One had outstanding trombonist Gianluca Petrella, who not only played top drawer post bop, but did some things on a trombone that I had never heard before. Saxophonist and clarinetist Mauro Negri shared the front line in the other, which also featured the Don Pullen-ish inside/outside piano of Giovanni Guida. But it was the Rava ballad features in both concerts that were the huge treats, especially “My Funny Valentine” in the latter where he so delicately implied the melody, a man of few notes. This band also tore into Charlie Parker's “Confirmation” – this appeared to be a spontaneous inspiration from Rava - showing the breadth of material that he'll tackle. (If you feel inspired enough to want to hear Rava, he'll be at Birdland in NYC From February 20 to February 23.)

Joe Lovano's “Flights of Fancy” Quintet was another heavily featured band. Unlike Rava, Lovano's four performances were all with this group. Joe's settings are often unique, as was this band, which featured two drummers, Otis Brown and Francisco Mela. Brown, who also traveled with Bobby Watson to India in January (and asked me to say “hello” to Lisa Henry, who he knows from work with the Thelonious Monk Institute), was the more traditional of the two drummers, and his role was more providing “play by play” as opposed to the percussive “color commentary” added by Mela; they were very complementary. Bassist Esparanza Spalding made a great impression, also, with her ability to nail intervals on the fly. Joe also had a special guest in his better half, vocalist Judi Silvano, who joined the band in the last third of the show. Their most ambitious piece was their take on Ornette Coleman's “Lonely Woman”. There was also a beautiful reading of “Sophisticated Lady”; Lovano is not only one of the great players, but also a lover of the breadth of jazz history.

One of Joe's first gigs was with organist Dr. Lonnie Smith; he was on Lonnie's Afrodesia in 1975, prior to his time with Woody Herman and Mel Lewis. And Joe's father, Tony “Big T” Lovano, played the wailin' tenor in Cleveland 's organ trios. So the organ trio is a big part of his heritage. It really was not a surprise when Lovano strolled in and started assembling his tenor about halfway through one of Dr. Smith's midnight sets. He stepped up at the end of Lonnie's jam on Jimi Hendrix' “Foxy Lady” and it was a whole new ballgame. Not that Smith's band hadn't already electrified the house. Guitarist Peter Bernstein (you are right, Matt Hopper, he is sick!) and the aggressive (a la Mike Warren) drummer Anthony Pinciotta help the Smith trio to really cook. With Lovano, the repertoire also changed as they found common ground on a couple of Monk tunes and then on “Olio”. I had never seen a tenor player walk the bar, and Lovano knows how to do it! Smith had seven performances during the festival.

The Clayton Brothers, bassist John and pianist Gerald, were also in town. We caught Gerald's trio, which played his interesting originals. Gerald's style reminds me of Monty Alexander, the rhythms are a highlight. The originals were not standard form fare; rather they all seemed to have several melodic themes that recurred throughout the pieces. I enjoyed his playing and writing and look forward to spending more time with his music.

There were three Italian bands that made great impressions. The High Five Quintet was classic hard bop, and their trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso was the most exciting I have heard since I heard Freddie Hubbard in the middle 1970's. He had that kind of tone, played great lines and trills; it was classic Jazz Messenger trumpet a la Clifford, Lee, and Freddie. He got our attention immediately in his solo on Cedar Walton's “Bolivia”, and proved to be a master with the plunger on Queen's “Another One Bites the Dust” (I'm telling you, this tune really worked!). Pianist Alessandro Lanzoni led a trio, and displayed a style not unlike Tommy Flanagan. He played some Bud Powell and other standard repertoire, and played them like they were his, like he's been working through them for years. He was remarkable, and only fifteen years old, a real talent. The Jimmy Villotti Pepper Band was a septet led by the guitarist from Bologna . The band featured a three sax front line playing Villotti originals, and had a sound not unlike Frank Strazzeri's Woodwinds West band from the early 1990's.

There was also the Remo Anzovino Trio's unique accompaniment to silent film clips. The combination is one that you want to see work; however, there was not enough harmonic variation in the originals to maintain interest over the performance.

To add to the festivities, every day there were a couple street parades with the marching funk band Funk Off. These guys were a blast, like the Southern University marching band cloned with early Kool and the Gang or James Brown's Famous Flames. The band had seven saxophones, three trumpets, a tuba, and four percussionists. The repertoire was funk and I mean funk, and they had jazz soloists on most tunes. They were a blast. In addition to the street parades, they also did a stage show – essentially a street party – just after midnight on New Year's Day. I don't dance, but I did.

There's a lot we didn't see, just never had the chance. We missed One For All, the NYC-based hard bop sextet with Eric Alexander, Jim Rotundi, Steve Davis, David Hazeltine, Nat Reeves, and George Fludas. They had about a half dozen sets, but they either conflicted with other shows or fatigue. Pianist Renato Sellani led a trio and also added saxophonist Gianni Basso at several sets at a restaurant, they are also among the best from Italy , but we couldn't fit them in. In retrospect, I could have heard every morsel of Enrico Rava, and very much regret missing the duos with Stefano Bollani. And there were another ten bands that I haven't mentioned that look interesting on paper.

The Italian scene is obviously very healthy. Every event we attended was full and the audiences obviously were thrilled, and the cross section of ages of both the audience and musicians makes me believe that the music has fans throughout their culture.

After the festival- Bird in Italy
We allowed time to travel to Ferrara (and nearby town Bondeno) to spend time with ex-pat trumpeter Tom Kirkpatrick and his wife Franca . Tom is a Charlie Parker disciple. “I even sought out and played with all of his pianists, like Kenny Drew, Duke Jordan, and Walter Bishop, Jr.”, Tom told us. Tom has a collection of Bird 78's, like on Dial, Savoy , Continental, etc. We spent a few hours listening to these, and I have never heard such presence of sound! The sound from the 78's is so much more pure than the LP or CD reissues, it was like Bird was in the room with us. Every nuance, every breath was there. Bird Lives in Bondeno!

It was great to hear that Tom is doing a Midwestern “mini-tour” in late March and early April, hopefully he'll be able to get to Kansas City to continue his Bird quest.

Italian Jazz – Is it all it seems?
What we heard was all very impressive, and the conclusion was that we need to learn more about the Italian scene. Tom was able to put it in perspective, though. “There are many wonderful musicians here, but it is not what you have in the states. It's not a part of the culture the way it is there. You go to any small city in the United States and you'll find excellent players. You can always find a pretty good rhythm section and good improvisers. They are often taken for granted, but they are there! That's not true here, there's not the same depth of talent.”

Sounds like what we say about Kansas City , every day. It's what others say about St. Louis and Louisville , Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Milwaukee . We all have musicians who are treasures, who few away from their locales know. If you travel and get out to local clubs, you know this. Just need to seek them out.

But, seek them out everywhere, as jazz has become a truly international music, enabling artists around the globe to tell their story or just add a new little twist to a story told millions of times. These great Italian musicians have embraced it and the music is richer for it.

RETURN TO FEBRUARY/MARCH 2008 MAIN INDEX