Italy

ROBERTO OTTAVIANO – EXTENDED LOVE & ETERNAL LOVE, released in September 2020
Active on the international jazz scene for nearly three decades, the Italian saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano has played and recorded with some of the most important American and European musicians on horseback between different generations. Eternal Love is a tribute to Africa, to its culture, its music and its people at a time of migration and racial intolerance that seems to take us back to the America of the 1950s and 1960s, with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. With his quintet, Puglia-born saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano focuses on music as medicine for the soul and as a cement for collective identities. He does so through a selection of original compositions by Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim, Charlie Haden, Mal Waldron and Dewey Redman, among others. Over the last few years, Roberto Ottaviano has made a comeback to his well-deserved leading role on the national jazz scene. The proof of this is, among other things, his brilliant achievements in Musica Jazz's Top Jazz 2017 and 2020 rankings as a musician, as a group and above all with his double album Resonance & Rhapsodies. But what really counts is the quality of his music, of his clearly calibrated projects and his happy encounters with important musical partners, from clarinettist Marco Colonna, a sort of Ottaviano's other self, to pianist Giorgio Pagoric, and the rhythm section made up of Giovanni Maier on double bass and Zeno De Rossi on drums. All of them are well attuned to the same musical and human wavelength as their leader.

Jazz