Da Qui a Palermo

Da Qui a Palermo
The Palermo Sketches Multimedia Project

Giancarlo Mazzù, guitar, voice
Luciano Troja, piano
Blaise Siwula, clarinet, alto sax
Rocco John Iacovone, soprano sax, alto sax

Visuals: 3112HTM feat. Fortyone Pictures
Paintings: Denise Fusco Iacovone

World Première

Produced by Almendra Music

Giancarlo Mazzù and Luciano Troja have played together since 2002. Their music is mainly based on the search for new forms and expressions, related to tradition with a solid jazz background, mixed with spontaneous composition, folk echoes, and classical forms.  They live in Italy, and they perform in the US every year. In NYC, they founded in 2011 a trio with the veteran of improv-music Blaise Siwula, with whom they released three CDs, and performed all around NY. Since 2016, they have been joined by Rocco John Iacovone, another gem of NYC improv-music. Together they have played around Sicily, in festivals (Curva Minore Season, 20th Year Celebrations), cultural spaces (Cantiere dell’Incanto, Museo dello Strumento Musicale) and historical music seasons (Filarmonica Laudamo, 96th Season). During the stay in Palermo they recorded the CD Palermo Sketches at Zeit Studio of the Almendra label.

In the CD, they talk about Palermo only through their music. For their performance at Casa Italiana, they will also be aided by images

The music of the album Palermo Sketches was captured live-in-studio on a Spring afternoon in Palermo (Italy), after a week of concerts that the quartet played around Sicily. It was spontaneously composed in a free flow of ideas, with no edits and no overdubs, resulting in music that comes from Palermo’s atmospheres, mysteries and secret corners. There is in fact a lot to be inspired by in the capital city of Sicily, an island which has been for millennia at the crossroads of civilizations. There are the prehistoric graffiti in the Addaura cave, on the coastal side of Mount Pellegrino, the hill overlooking Palermo, attesting the presence of humans beginning in the Paleolithic. Not far from the Addaura cave, the tropical-color panorama of Mondello opens up to a sandy bay, whose seafront promenade doesn’t go unnoticed not least due to The Old Bathhouse known to the locals as ‘Charleston‘, a building unique of its kind and one of the most beautiful flowers of European Art Nouveau style. Once you get into the city center you may want to take a bus, might be the 101 line, and have a general impression of the city’s everyday life. After that you may also want to have a walk in the alleys of the older districts, bearing such suggestive street names as ‘Sedie Volanti’ (‘Flying Chairs’) or ‘Gioiamia‘ (‘My love’), and there learn from the locals why, when the figures don’t add up and it’s impossible to have accurate information, they say: “it’s the number of the Devils of the Zisa!”.

– Gianluca Cangemi, product manager of Almendra Music