BLUE NOTE MILANO (CASTA DIVA GROUP) PRESENTS JAZZMI

September 27, 2016

JAZZMI, a festival unique of its kind in Italy, makes its debut in Milan. Designed and produced by the Teatro dell’Arte and Ponderosa Music & Art in collaboration with Blue Note Milano, it is taking place thanks to the Department of Culture of Milan City Council, under the artistic direction of Luciano Linzi and Titti Santini.
The event aims to connect with the variegated realities of urban life and to make the experience not simply a jazz festival but a journey within all forms of the musical genre.
With more than 120 events and 80 concerts, over 300 artistes are geared up to enchant Milan in a tour lasting 12 days. The programme will be full of inter-connected events, making their way through the entire city and making JAZZMI a shared and truly live event.
The most important venues will be the Teatro dell’Arte and the Blue Note.
As Andrea De Micheli, CEO of Casta Diva Group, the company which has recently acquired Blue Note, says: “Blue Note Milano is perhaps Europe’s most prestigious jazz club, and we couldn’t possibly not be a leading player in a jazz festival such as JAZZIMI. We want to open this “shrine to jazz” to the entire city and to its young population through personal involvement.
The festival will start from on high, from the Belvedere Jannacci viewing gallery at the top of the Pirelli Tower, thanks to the Regional Council of Lombardia and the Milan Conservatory.
With the significant support of YAMAHA, JAZZMI will then arrive at the new Museum of Culture on the occasion of its Basquiat exhibition, with concerts by Luigi Ranghino, the Dynamic Trio by Marco De Gennaro and Seby Burgio and the narratives and music of Arto Lindsay and Carlo Antonelli.
There will also be more concerts to kick off JAZZMI.
At 9 o’clock on 4th November at the Teatro dell’Arte, master double-bass player Ron Carter will open the jazz festival with his Golden Striker Trio. At the same time, at the Blue Note there will be the exceptional performance of David Sanborn and the Christian McBride Trio.
At 22.30 the Santeria Social Club will take the stage with its fantastic Turkish/New York sound from Ilhan Ersahin and the Istanbul Session Group.
“Our aim is to bring jazz and its performers back into the centre of the development of Milan’s musical culture, bringing all the associations, clubs and centres of research and education devoted to jazz into one network, such as that proposed by the Milan City Council in its experimental platform Jazz&Milano, which allied various entities,” according to Councillor for Culture Filippo Del Corno. “With JazzMi and its extraordinary line-up of 70 concerts in 12 days, this network provides a show spread across the whole city, thus making the whole city of Milan vibrate in unison, a city in perennial and unpredictable change, just like jazz, equally fascinating and in continuous metamorphosis.”
JAZZMI will not just be music, but also art with Roberto Polillo at Base Milano, Riccardo Schwamenthal at the Teatro dell’Arte and Roberto Ciffarelli at Blue Note Milano narrating a fascinating photographic history of jazz in the city; meetings with performers. Three special gigs accompanied by Minimum Fax, where audiences can share the experience of Gilles Peterson, Robert Glasper, Paolo Fresu and Uri Caine; books and jazz anecdotes with meetings and concerts in bookshops with the support of Punto Touring, La Feltrinelli, Open Milano, Libreria Gogol and Verso; cinema with four shows at the Palestrina cinema; lessons narrating the history of jazz, in cooperation with Associazione Musica Oggi.