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JAZZ LATIN - DOING AS THE ROMANS DO

From the day in 1904 when a group of Creole dancers and singers, styling themselves as the ‘Creators of the Cake Walk’, strutted onto the stage of the Teatro Eden in Milan, Italy has been a melting pot for American and home-grown jazz. A combination of their historical love for every kind of music and the cultural cross-fertilization seeded by the massive emigrant movements of the late 19th and early 20th century attracted young Italian musicians to the new music, in turn inspired by its rhythmic and harmonic innovations and absorbing it into the existing musical melee.

Following on from the Dixieland imitators of the 1920s and big bands of the 1930s and outlasting the retrogressive Fascist era, jazz in Italy began to find a large audience in the early 1950s, paralleled by the cinematic new wave and bringing forth successive generations of indigenous musicians.

Today jazz is as much a part of Italian life as classical music and it is embraced with the same passion. Clubs and venues abound in virtually every major city and a host of international festivals take place throughout the year, including the world-famous Umbria event in July. While jazz in Italy remains a melting pot for all jazz genres recognisable regional forms have gradually developed, based on a melding of innate musical influences with modernist developments but consistently underpinned by a combination of lyricism and improvisation, often within recognisable contemporary styles and often taking them to a new level.

Quadricromia

Paolo Porta

Over the past year they have recorded ten top quality jazz albums, from artists including Alberto Mandarini, Paolo Porta and the quartet Quadricromia to blues guitarist Marco Piccioni & the group Flex, Latin jazz drummer Calixto Oviedo and the Funk Jazz Euro Groove Department featuring Michael Manring.

Jazz in its many different forms is the passion at DDE. Mike and Dee own and run their own studios hidden in the outskirts of the Turin woods, which provides the ideal environment to nurture and develop talent.

DDE Records was launched in the UK in 2006, with the release of two albums on February 20th: saxophonist Paolo Porta’s “Deceptive Resolution” and the eponymous album from Quadricromia. Paolo Porta and Quadricromia performed as a double bill at the Pizza Express Jazz Club, Dean Street, London on March the 1st and 2nd.