MAKE MUSIC DAY
ITALIAN JAZZ GROUP CELEBRATES
By Nancy DeSanti:
This year an enthusiastic and appreciative audience celebrated the annual Make Music Day at the Embassy of Italy with a performance by an Italian jazz group which paid tribute to Italian cinema and the soundtracks which have been so important to the films’ success. The event, sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute on June 17, 2019, featured the Rosario Giuliani Quartet, winner of the “best group” award at the European Jazz Contest.
It could well be described as “quartet takes a fresh look at unforgettable movie soundtracks.”
It could well be described as “quartet takes a fresh look at unforgettable movie soundtracks.”
Rosario Giuliani
The jazz quartet was led by Rosario Giuliani on saxophone, with Luciano Biondini on the accordion, Enzo Pietropaoli on the double bass and Michele Rabbia on drums. The group gave the unforgettable melodies a fresh look and a modernist approach. The popular movie themes were composed by Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone and they were from classics such as Cinema Paradiso, 8 e mezzo, La Dolce Vita and C’era una volta in America (In the U.S., Morricone is best known for writing the music for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”). So the audience knew all of them. Everyone loved this group and wanted an encore, so they came back on stage and played a jazzy, extended version of the theme from The Godfather. One of our long-time AMHS members, Romeo Sabatini, has a cousin, Edda Sabatini Dell’Orso, who sang on many of Morricone’s soundtracks. You can hear Edda’s singing on YouTube.
Festa Della Musica scene in Italy
This embassy event was part of the worldwide Make Music Day which got its start in France and is celebrated in Europe each year on June 21 with free public musical performances by both professional and amateur musicians. In Italy, it’s known as the Festa Della Musica which began in 1985. But only in the last few years has it has grown to its current enormous size — more than 8,000 performances across 700 cities in 2018, with free musical events taking place in Italy’s 22 airports, 9 rail stations, 46 prisons, 92 official cultural sites, and hundreds of Carrefour grocery stores, just to name a few. ❚