Press Release
Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz
S.Anna Arresi - Piazza del Nuraghe

Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz

For its twenty-sixth edition, Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz (trans. Bordering between Sardinia and Jazz) keeps moving according to the aims that made its history so distinguishable, that is, against that common ground dominated by sloppy and chaotic jazz festivals.

The festival originates from a basic choice, an idea of jazz not as that stylistic exercise to find enjoyment in its virtuous devotion to past models of music, as in a fundamentally narcissistic dimension of innocuous entertainment, but jazz as a pulsing expression of contemporary times. This is a jazz that searches inside its history not for a reassuring peace of style and a timeless beauty, but for an example of that restless relationship with present times, that unresolved relationship which is constantly leaning towards the search of adequate languages to describe the new.

Following this perspective, Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz has placed its flag (especially with its most recent editions) on artists who are still regularly performing and are unmistakable examples of innovation (Abrams, Braxton, Mitchell, the Lewis from the Chicago’s AACM, Pat Metheny, William Parker, Butch Morris) or other recognised bygone experimenters who still keep representing a strong inspiration for a visionary and non-conforming musical practice (Don Cherry, Albert Ayler).

This year, the choice has fallen on Jaco Pastorius, a burning star who has crossed the music scene of the seventies and eighties leaving behind a very bright trace. He died in 1987 in tragic circumstances, at the age of thirty-five only. During his brief yarn Pastorius managed to affirm his own style and become a mile stone in the evolution of electric bass guitar playing. He also raised as an emblematic protagonist of the music scene of his epoch, and even today he is one of the most loved and worshipped music heroes by many a music passionate.

The repertoire of Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz celebrates Jaco with a dense net made of links, tributes, attendances and a particular care for the figure of the electric bass and the contrabass. The musical universe of which Pastorius was a designer will be evoked by two of the most important musicians with whom Pastorius collaborated. These are the guitar players Mike Stern and Bireli Lagrene. The first will play with a quartet, and the latter with a trio. Pastorius’ art will be revisited by bassist Maurizio Rolli and his Rolli’s Tones Big Band, on a concert which will host two very special guests: Mike Stern and Julius Pastorius, Jaco’ son, at the drums. In one of the two concerts by the Exploding Star Orchestra, the director Rob Mazurek will dedicate a new composition to the memory of Pastorius, giving prevalence to bass player Matthew Lux. And especially to Pastorius will the performances of contrabbasse player Silvia Bolognesi (together with speaker Alberto Masala and equilibrist Valentin) and the duo Victor Bailey & Othello Molineaux be created. Some of the best bass players ever will walk the stage of Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz to pay a tribute to the epic story of electric bass, of which Pastorius wrote some of its most glorious pages.

Michael Manring, notorious for his works with the Windham Hill Records –the famous “new age” studios- and for his collaboration with Henry Kaiser’s and Leo Smith’s homage to the electric Miles, has made treasure of Pastorius style lessons, and elevated them with his own virtuosism.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma came to notoriety during the same years as Pastorius, and owes his early rise to fame to his participation to Ornette Colemen’s Prime Time band. With his funky touch, his peculiar sound and his implacable sense of the rhythm, Tacuma is one of the most suggestive, original and worshipped electric bass players of the latest decades.

Welcomed into the Weather Report during the beginning of the eighties, Victor Bailey has been the bass player with the not-so-easy duty to replace Pastorius in that magnificent band, playing together with Shorter and Zawinul. On the other hand, Melvin Gibbs is one of the most versatile and stirring bass players in the present day scene, holding an extended curriculum of collaborations with the foremost protagonists of Free, Free-Funk, Avant-Garde and Rock scene (Defunkt, Sonny Sharrock, Vernon Reid, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Rollins Band). Amongst the most technically sound bass players in the whole scene, with a long experience that extends its boundaries to include works with Bill Bruford, Metheny and Van Halen, Jeff Berlin performs a unique style that doesn’t lack affinity with that of Pastorius. And there will be another pioneer too, a forerunner of new technical approaches, gifted of a superb musical taste: Tony Levin, who parades an endless number of top quality collaborations in the rock scene (John Lennon, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Yes, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits).

Roy Babbington too will contribute to this year’s praise to Pastorius, through a celebration of bass guitar. Babbington first accompanied, and then substituted Hugh Hopper in the Soft Machine, and it will be precisely with this historical band that he will perform in Sant’Anna Arresi (John Etheridge –guitar-, Theo Travis –sax & flute-, John Marshall –drum- and Tony Levin as a special guest). Buster Williams, double-bass and electric bass-guitar player who strides the jazz scenes from the end of the fifties is the person who can claim collaborations with half the people of the jazz world, from Mary Lou Williams to Gil Evans, from Betty Carter to McCoy Tyner and the six double-bass players in the Orchestre de Contrebasses (amongst whom there is also Christian Gentet, who founded it in 1981). Williams is also known as the man who adds performative and scenic elements to the musical aspect.

Together with the eulogy to Pastorius will correspond one more topic, which is possible to spot in between the lines of this year’s line-up. That is the quintessence of one of the most vital and appetising musical seams of the last decades: Free-Funk, of which Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz will propound all the most illustrious exponents (apart from Ornette Coleman who, in a certain way has baptised this lineage, but has also abandoned the course of Free-Funk a long time ago). Amongst the interpreters of Free-Funk we will see performing the Defunkt, with Joe Bowie at the trumpet, the trio composed by Ronald Shannon Jackson (a very unique case of drummer who can boast of having regularly accompanied three of the monsters of Free: Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman) with Vernon Reid (also guitar player of Living Colour) and Melvin Gibbs, guitar player James Blood Ulmer who will perform solo and Jamaaladeen Tacuma. With this line-up Ai confini tra Sardegna e Jazz confirms its consideration for neo-American advanced jazz, a consideration that, judging from the choices made by actual festival trends, shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz confirms once more a very demanding interest which elevates it above all other Italian jazz festivals and places it amongst the most thoughtful and significant in Europe. The festival puts relevant weight on the innovative and non-conventional use of the orchestral dimension. After the lineage of bands leaded by William Parker and Butch Morris, Rob Mazurek, the Chicago cornetist who represents one of the most relevant characters in the actual scene, and his Exploding Star Orchestra, will keep high that long tradition of orchestral formations of the festival. And, as a habit, the festival will continue one of its long, bright, and praiseworthy tradition, allowing the orchestras to be listened more than one night only.