A Jazz Home in Rome

News, From the Magazine, Various Artists

By Ashley Kahn I Apr. 10, 2024

Rome’s Casa del Jazz delivers a tremendous outdoor summer season from one of the city’s beautiful locales.
(Photo: Courtesy Casa Del Jazz)

The trees stand majestic and tall, twisting 75 feet into the air — 23 meters by local measure — with leafy canopies shooting out near the very top. More than a dozen of Italy’s umbrella pines, some more than 100 years old, greet visitors as they enter the spacious grounds of Rome’s Casa del Jazz, one of Europe’s most memorable and unlikely musical venues.

It’s hard to describe what makes Casa del Jazz — now celebrating its 19th year as a hub of jazz activity in the Eternal City — such a rare experience for music audiences and for musicians alike. There are many elements to point to, including an excellent sound system and top-level talent that regularly perform in the villa near the city’s Porta Ardeatina area. But most begin with its visually stunning impact.

“First of all, the architecture is so distinctive,” says Daniele Pitteri, head of the city’s musical foundation (Fondazione Musica per Roma), which oversees Casa del Jazz and other venues. “Then the large park, with the tall pine trees and the rest of the vegetation that hides remains of ancient Roman buildings and the restaurant with its beautiful terrace. It’s also a place for big summer concerts under the sky and smaller concerts in a cozy indoor theater. It really is a kind of small town entirely dedicated to jazz.”

What is also often mentioned is that before it became a public venue, Casa del Jazz was the home of a mafioso boss. In 2001, after authorities brought down the notorious Banda Magliana crime syndicate and confiscated various properties, Rome’s progressive mayor Walter Veltroni wanted to repurpose them for public, cultural use. Veltroni had been a journalist and filmmaker, and for him, jazz was a personal priority.

“Veltroni was already sensitive to jazz music — lucky us,” says Luciano Linzi, Casa del Jazz’s longtime artistic director and a veteran of the Italian music industry. Veltroni’s plan was to erect both Casa del Jazz and the new Auditorium Parco della Musica — the latter, larger venue focusing on classical music — and incorporate them into the city government itself. Finding someone with a passion for jazz, experience in the music business and skills dealing with local politics would be key.

In 2002, Veltroni had collaborated with Linzi — at the time the managing director of Warner Music for Italy in Milan — to assist him with a compilation recording intended to raise money to support water wells in Mozambique. The success of that project led Veltroni to ask Linzi to consider moving to Rome to assemble a staff and establish the various programs that would become part of Casa del Jazz, then still under construction. Veltroni’s original vision included presenting live performances outdoors during the summer season, and music and talk events in a smaller indoor theater throughout the year. (Disclosure: In past years, Casa del Jazz has hired this journalist to speak and moderate a number of discussions.) There would be a jazz research archive available to musicians, scholars and the public at large, as well as a recording facility to generate a series of album releases, plus guest house for musicians, and a restaurant and bar for the public.

“I found it fascinating and immediately said ‘Yes,’” Linzi remembers.

During spring of 2005, Casa del Jazz first opened its doors on April 21 — the legendary date of Rome’s founding — to much civic pomp, critical acclaim and music by an all-star Italian collective. The first few years saw the venue struggle somewhat to maintain steady audiences and deliver all the programs it promised. It succeeded in achieving a generational balance of live music, offering concerts by both younger Italian jazz musicians establishing themselves but also the country’s old guard.

Through its first six years, Casa del Jazz grew its reputation and expanded its bookings, developing into a desired stop on the European tour circuit for overseas jazz artists as well as Italian. Linzi expanded his duties to booking major artists — like Keith Jarrett — into the Auditorium Parco della Musica. Perhaps his most enduring and certainly high-profile achievement during this period was the “Jazz Italiano Live” series, recordings of performances at Casa del Jazz that — for four years — found their way to mainstream music fans: selling on newsstands through the auspices of L’Espresso/La Repubblica publications. Danilo Rea, Rita Marcotulli and Francesco Cafiso were a few of the artists who benefitted from this novel distribution plan that proved commercially successful; the four-CD collection including music by all the artists sold more than a million copies.

By the end of the ’00s, Veltroni was no longer mayor and Casa del Jazz found itself increasingly challenged by an annual cycle of securing public support and private funding. Fortunately, not for long. After joining the historic Umbria Jazz Festival for a few years as well as helping initiate JazzMI, Milan’s annual jazz festival, Linzi was lured back to Casa del Jazz in 2015 by Dario Francescini, Italy’s national cultural minister — another official with a fondness for the music.

Casa del Jazz had run into problems: In 2014, due to a lack of support in the city administration, funding ran out and the year was cancelled. But with Linzi’s return, a fresh round of funding began. Almost 10 years later, Casa del Jazz is more robust than ever. An appearance there is as significant to any touring musician as a slot at major European festivals. To anyone visiting Rome who drops in on any event at Casa del Jazz — and one should — the program is running at full steam as it nears 20 years in business: top-level talent, consistently full seats and programming that benefits from a steady curatorial hand.

“The big challenge now is to have continuity, and not to be interrupted again as we were in 2014, because any time a production like this is stopped you have to start again from zero,” Linzi says. “The big news this morning is that Radio Montecarlo ,or ‘RMC’ as we call it, will be our official sponsor. In Italy, that means we’ve made it into the major leagues.”

Linzi is standing outside the administrative offices, directly under one of the pine trees. He looks up and says, “We do have one other challenge — taking care of our pines. It seems that climate change had a bad effect on our tall friends. In 2021 and ’22, the summers were so hot that they began dropping resin on the seats, which made a mess. We had to clean some the seats and found some tree experts who knew what to do. It’s a small price to pay to have this magnificence above us.” DB