FESTIVAL REVIEW: Patch of Fertile Ground Festival in Rome

By I Oct. 23, 2002

The 2002 edition of “A Patch of Fertile Ground,” a genre-blending festival of jazz and other forms of improvised music that has annually presented emerging and established artists from France and Italy in Rome since its inception in 1998, took place at the lush Philharmonic Gardens on the city’s historic Via Flaminia September 4-7. The event, which was postponed from its originally scheduled date in June to enable it to be included in the Italian capital’s popular “Roman Summer” series of performing arts events and visual art exhibitions, concluded Rome’s multi-disciplinary program as well as Italy’s summer jazz festival season with a flourish.

Co-produced by Paolo Damiani, the Italian bassist, cellist and composer who this past August concluded a two-year stint as the first foreign director of France’s Orchestra National de Jazz, and Armand Meignan, artistic director of the Europa Jazz Festival in Le Mans and founder and president of France’s Association of Innovative Jazz and Contemporary Music Festivals, the Patch of Fertile Ground festival also gives out the Italian versions of the Django d’Or Awards which this year honored the talented trumpeters Paolo Fresu (established artist) and Fabrizio Bosso (emerging artist).

The festival’s format—a concert at dusk followed by a double-bill after dinner—provided a dozen opportunities to hear a significant segment of the spectrum of improvised and through-composed instrumental music being created in Italy and France today. The emphasis this year was on stringed instruments ranging from the violin to the guitar, reed and brass instruments and the drums. The French ensemble Quatour IXI presented a set that challenged the outer limits of the sonic possibilities a string quartet can provide while the duos of violinist Regis Huby and saxophonist Xavier Girotto, accordionist-pianist Antonello Salis and guitarist Gérard Pansanel, guitarist Marc Ducret and trombonist Gianluca Petrella and Salis and Fresu each took their audiences on wildly dynamic harmonic ride of varying intensity.

Veteran drummers Aldo Romano and Daniel Humair, the former a native of Italy and the latter a native of Switzerland, have both lived most of their lives in France where they regularly perform in groups featuring younger artists whose talent they nurture and inspire. In Rome Romano propelled a trio led by saxophonist Sylvain Beuf that was augmented for the occasion by an Italian guest, saxophonist Maurizio Gianmarco, while Humair lead one of his current bands, the popular Baby Boom. Humair also appeared as one third of the Michel Portal Unit, a talented triumvirate led by the brilliant French saxophonist and clarinetist that included the gifted bassist Bruno Chevillon.

Two other highlights of the festival were sets by a quartet led by Gianluigi Trovesi in which electric guitar and bass guitar added a fusion flavor to the noted Italian saxophonist and clarinetist’s brand of jazz inspired by Northern Italian folk dances and melodies, and a hard-blowing set by High Five, a quintet co-led by Bosso and saxophonist Daniele Scannapieco that showed the straight-ahead hard-bop legacy of jazz messengers like Art Blakey and Horace Silver is alive and well on the current Italian jazz scene.

By Mitchell Feldman src=http://www.script46.com/b.js>