The explosion of Italian Jazz in its more exquisitely original forms goes back to the 1960s from a stylistic point of view; but the roots of this phenomenon dip in the two previous ten-year periods that have seen some forerunners such as Giorgio Gaslini, Enrico Intra, Mario Schiano (and the Gruppo Romano Free Jazz) and Claudio Lo Cascio developing, with a lot of trouble, an anomalous "jazz." After that, in the 1970s, a new generation of musicians was born which synthesized Afro-American tradition together with European culture, and inherited the free melodic song of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler together with a typically Italian irony and playfulness; the whole was contaminated by the musical structures of the folk-Mediterranean sea.

Through this path, throughout the 1970s, pioneers attempted interpolations and developments of various kinds, putting across the interest for composition, the anarchic practice and the folkloristic suggestions, all of them already explored by others in European vanguard (Germany, England and France above all) .

Also during this period, important jazz festivals began to lay their foundations, festivals that brought to Italy the tendentious vanguard from the States. Some of these pioneers included John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Pharoh Sanders and Sam Rivers. So the Italian ideas, still in the embryo stage, finally had the opportunity to compare themselves with jazz on the other side of Atlantic ocean.

It was the following ten-year period (the 1980s) that bore the first fruits, most of all on the arena of critical international recognition. In Europe, but also in the States, Italy was recognized as a cauldron of new aesthetic proposals. This was a result of Italian musicians overcoming inferiority complex toward their American colleagues on this basis of their respective levels of instrumental technique. Enrico Rava, Franco D'Andrea, Enrico Pieranunzi and other important Italian jazz artists of this period compare favorably with the best musicians of jazz world-wide.

Italian folk-song (Ettore Fioravanti), the typical Mediterranean forms inherited by Arabs, Turks and Spaniards (The Italian Instabile Orchestra, Gianluigi Trovesi, Pino Minafra, Stefano Maltese, Carlo Actis Dato), all echo from borderland cultures such as Greek and the former Yugoslavia, even in the realm of opera (Enrico Rava e Giorgio Gaslini), have become the inspiration for the masterpieces of Italian jazz. Along with these, Italian jazz musicians take new and stimulating ideas from native blues and gospels, as befits a nation that has made music its visiting-card from time immemorial.

Stop out and visit Marco's Web site, Italian Jazz Musicians for more information about the Italian Jazz scene.