Member Since: 11/25/2006
Band Website: giorgioocchipinti.com
Band Members:GIORGIO OCCHIPINTI GLOBAL MUSIC NONETTO Giorgio Occhipinti (piano, direction, compositions) Sonia Slany (violin) Joanna Lewis (violin) Nico Ciricugno (viola) Tiziana Cavalieri (cello) Giuseppe Guarrella (double bass) Matteo Gallini (clarinets) Olivia Bignardi (clarinets) Antonio Moncada (drums & kettledrumsGIORGIO OCCHIPINTI DODICI MOTTETTI FOR STRINGS SEXTET, ALTO SAX, RECITING VOICE Giorgio Occhipinti (direction, compositions) Sonia Slany (violin) Joanna Lewis (violin) Nico Ciricugno (viola) Tiziana Cavalieri (cello) Vito Amatulli (cello) Giuseppe Guarrella (double bass), Vittorino Curci (alto sax & reciting voice)DECEMBER THIRTY JAZZ TRIO
Giorgio Occhipinti (piano), Giuseppe Guarrella (double bass), Francesco Branciamore (drums)Also a SPECIAL EDITION of
DECEMBER THIRTY JAZZ TRIO plus VINNY GOLIA (saxes, clarinets, flute)LESS OF FIVE Giorgio Occhipinti (piano), Olivia Bignardi (alto sax), Giuseppe Guarrella (double bass), Antonio Moncada (drums)DUETSEQUENCES Giorgio Occhipinti (piano), Olivia Bignardi (clarinets)INCANDESCENCES EUROPEAN DUO
Giorgio Occhipinti (piano), Joelle Léandre (double bass)KNOW'S QUARTET Stefano Maltese (saxes, bass clarinet), Giorgio Occhipinti (piano), Giuseppe Guarrella (double bass), Emanuele Primavera (drums)GIORGIO OCCHIPINTI CELLOS SEQUENCES
Giorgio Occhipinti (dir. compositions), Tiziana Cavalieri and Vito Amatulli (cellos)GIORGIO OCCHIPINTI STRINGS QUARTET SEQUENCES
Giorgio Occhipinti (dir. compositions),
Sonia Slany and Joanna Lewis (violins) Nico Ciricugno (viola) Tiziana Cavalieri (cello)
Influences: GIORGIO OCCHIPINTI "UN POCO LOCO" SHOTS
INTERWIEW TO THE “DANAS†(YUGOSLAVIA) DAILY PAPER1. It is unusual for a young artist being classically trained for piano to get attached for a couple more instruments, like drums and flute, in your case. How did you fell playing three instruments, and how did this one-man ensemble directed your future career?I have begun my approach to one musical instrument at five years, just with the drums of the City's Band. Immediately also I have begun to play the piano. After I have played also the flute. I always have been fascinated from music (in its total). To know several the musical instruments, for example, always has been my enormous interest. Like compositor, before writing music for the instruments, I want to perfectly know any instrument for which I compose. Nearly like playing them! My career of musician, of improviser and above all of composer has been strongly forged from this my interest towards many musical instruments. In some way, playing the drum, pianoforte and flute I have immediately had an approach directed with the three foundations of music: rhythm, harmony, melodia. I think that all this has been sure a solid base for all which I have constructed like composer and improviser, like musician. Today I play only the piano (this is my instrument) but it is remained in me a great interest for the other musical instruments; in this period, for example, I write much music for strings.2. Can you tell me something about your father trumpeter and influence of this fact to your decision to get involved in music?The infuence that has had my father in my decision to approach me the study of music has been fundamental, very very important. My father is a amateur trombettist; he play in the weddings, in the great cerimony and dance's evenings. The more important thing that he has given to me has been the enormous love for the music and for all which is creative art. We haven't shared the musical and artistic choices but we have shared Music, the Art. I don't love to think to the music like only a way to amuse themselves or to pass the pleasant hours but like an Art that helps to reflect, to think, nearly a therapy that uses the sounds to force the person who play or that listens to must make remarkable efforts, to must think, to enjoy the beauty of the sound and the force of the noise, or of the amalgam of the harmony; he must reflect on the structure of music, on the infuences of that musician (from where he comes, from where he arrives, which travels has made that musician to play that music). My father has given me all this, even if he play music to make dance the people, he play the Italian canzonette. But I am pleasing to my father because the way that I cover is a road that, unconsciously, he has indicated me.3. You have been a member of and often you formed many attractive jazz formations, and the all won to be among the most important Italian bands of the kind. And the CDs, this bands have been recording for CDs of the year. What was, in your opinion, the secret of those ensembles of your from the 90'?
I think that the secret of all my groups, of my projects is my music, my way to write music, my way to create music and to make play my music, the approach that I have with the improvisation and in the same time the way in which I make to improvise my musicians. The main hinge of all my musical idea (that characterizes my groups and my CDs) is the composition, the structure! The composition is thought like construction with musical or graphical contemporary notation, or also like creative structure that uses the improvisation like means to construct the composition. In practical, in this last way, the composer creates the composition using to the maximum the creativity of the interpreter but he doesn't leave the interpreter free to compose: he uses the intepreter to construct the own composition. This second modality is also a "center point" of my laboratories and workshop of experimental music in which I try to transmit to the students this my idea of improvisation like not improvisation. In my last discographic work "REVOLUTION", that will exit next May 2003 for the German label "Between The Lines" (recorded with my group GIORGIO OCCHIPINTI GLOBAL MUSIC NONETTO) and that I hope of being able to carry here in Yugoslavia the next year, I use these two ways that identify my music. I write in the cover of this new CD: "... This recording is like a voyage toward my intimate artistic integrity and toward revolutionary elaboration of music…Heterogeneus language and creative universe’s emanations filtrated and enslaved into my exclusive code perpetually devoted to the screening of globality and circularity... This music can only be desired and loved; only in this way it will be able to be decoded. Otherwise it wouldn’t be able to have its life. Art is devotion, consecration, love; a spiritual voyage toward own ideals. It is a inestimable projection and “subjectively objective†of a cretivity. Art and a global music are a universal language, that we, revolutionaries that imagine the essence of things, identify with vehemence and longing to know the thousand “overtoure†of the human control and creative and of the experimantation..."
I think that these words are the synthesis of the reason for which my projects arrives straight to the center, to the heart of the artistic speech.4. How would you describe your work with Olivia Bignardi in DUETSEQUENCES?
This project with Olivia was born from the crossing of two compositive ideas and from the encounter with this wonderful improviser and interpreter that play soprano and bass clarinets (and in other projects also alto sax). The first idea was born from the composition work that I have made writing seven sequences for Cellos Duet , four sequences for Strings Quartet, twelve mottetti for strings sextet and alto sax. From these works (someone published on Cd, others will be published in the next few years) born the structural idea that I have used in the Duetsequences. The second idea born in my laboratories of experimental music (the idea of "improvisation - not improvisation" about which I spoke before). The encounter with Olivia Bignardi (that I have known in Bologna at the festival TPO in which we have played in duet) has given input final to this my project. Olivia play also in my nonetto and an other group parallel to these DUETSEQUENCES that, using the same modalities of which I have already spoken, advance in the improvisation - composition nearer euroopean and contemporary jazz (if we want to use the tags). This group named "LESS OF FIVE" ,beyond me and Olivia, it has to inside Giuseppe Guarrella (great bass player) and Antonio Moncada. Also these two musicians make part of my nonetto (and Giuseppe play also with me in the "DECEMBER THIRTY JAZZ TRIO" historical group of the italian jazz).5. The critics note main three the elements in your music: classical European avant-garde, Sicilian folklore and even Italian opera which is fascinating. Is it a good luck to be born on a ground that offers so many eminent influences (including the opera, which was born and developed in Italy, influencing all other national types of his genre in Europe)?Infinity of persons tries to discover and to focalize hundred of ancestries in my music. Not there is a rewiews of my works in which a journalist or a critic don't send back to that musician or that composer, and same I cannot deny that to times me effort to search and to examine in depth the several sources that are to the sure origins of my artistic inspirations. The truth is that my music is the controlled preparation of a constant conflict of suggestions that reach from the outside and that, journeying me to the inside, changes in an other language. Be born in Sicily for me represents one enormous fortune! The Sicily, from always, has been the center of the Mediterranean, the crossing and the crash of cultures and my music represent all this totally. When I think to my music I don't watch that music I want to make , than music it is my music. I think only to the creative idea. All the things that come listened in my music are only the fruit of one immediacy, of a directed creative thought to the composition and the structure, to the musical shape. Sure within my music there are many coming from infuences from the birth place, from the earth where alive, from music and the art that encircles me (the Sicily , the Europe) and the opera is one of the things in which they are dipped to me totally, especially in my adolescence. All it magnetizes and it allows to create, if it is used in the just way and with the love that can be felt for that you have in your intimate even if it comes from external influences: the constant and imposing risen towards that creative and human equilibrium that allows to control our creative ideas that it live in every human being.6. As an artist in whose music experts can notice strong Sicilian roots, helping this music to have echoes all over the Europe, but America and Africa as well, how do you feel about current world music trends.What I see and feel today in music it is a continuous and perpetual commercialization, to render this art simple, easy, transforming it in a simple light music and rendering ridicule of its functions of search, experimentation, creativity. The young people, in special way, are attracted more and more from all that can be caught up easy and this provokes an impoverishment of all that is culture, of all that it demands engagement in finding other creative and artistic ways exploring all the possibilities with which an artist can express his art! My hope and that we will to change this tendency bringing back Music towards its true made artistic dimension of study and of search, made of engagement intellectual and also physicist. I think to the Music like a place where all the diversities, all the languages, all the people of the world can be expressed. The difference in music and the art is always connected to the culture of the earth in which it is lived and it is born, to the origin place. For this the heterogeneity between musics of the north and the south, east or west, don't exist! Really dissonances in every creative thought (in the crashs and in the comparison live the creativity) because the Art is tied to just the space of belongings but, at the same time, are a cosmopolita language: to process the own roots offering them to all, this is the great challenge. In my case, in my music, all the differences cooperate to the creation of a single language. Bewitches me the observation of "all which is not equalâ€: to use them is, for me, a work or, in order better to say, an enormous game of figuration that renders them homogenous. In bottom, festival or a review of music or Art would have, today, to realize just this enormous ideal. The living and vibrating theatre, than alive in all the artistic shapes. Also music is theatre: the theatre of the sounds of the world where the north and the south, the east and the west are various equal.7. Give us a brief description of jazz you play today.I haven't never understood what I play! I don't love the tags, the labels, and I don't think to what I am playing but I think only to the sounds, the noises, the shapes, the structures, the instruments that will play my music. I think to the musical speech, the possible variations and the new possibilities towards which I want that my music heads. I still don't know if what I play is called jazz or contemporary music and, still more, I don' know if the jazz or other musics has never existed . For me exist the Art that is taken advantage of various languages, between which the music. The music that I play is only a travel towards all that that I love and that it is within of me. I have only tried, till now, to show my spirit through the music. Therefore for me the music that I currently play is only the mirror of my spirit and my creativity that it comes from all that it has influenced me in the art and the life, from all that that I have studied, tried and experimented, nothing more.
Sounds Like: My … REVOLUTIONorganised chaos as musical synthesis
compositions and musical fragments in the form of dances and sequences form the Revolution SuiteI have approached these forms in a very loose and open way. The music is mostly written but I have left wide margins for improvisation. The improvisation, however, is used as a method to complete and enhance the general structure of the compositions by giving it an “impromptu†character rather than just being the vehicle for the display of musical skills by the various improvisors.The talent of the musicians that form the Global Music Nonetto gives me the privilege of relying on their creativity to lead my compositions towards territories that change at every performance and that I could not possibly crystallise in my charts.
Revolution is a suite commissioned from the festival MUSIC ON MUSIC (October 13, 2001 – Wien) and from the label BETWEEN THE LINES (Germany), The theme of “Music on Music Festival†is the creation of music inspired by the music that has been composed until today. In approaching the theme of the festival I have relied on the “leitmotiv†of my life as a composer: I have tried to synthesise the various sources of inspiration that have spurred my creativity in the past. The major inspiration is the music of the 20th century. This music, however, is seen through the lens of my personal human experience shaped by my being an Italian and, in particular, a Sicilian. The feel of the Mediterranean Sea, this way, represents for me a tool to interpret and reconsider every musical form that has been created in the last century, from folk to contemporary music, from jazz to rock music, from opera to music for marching band, typical of where I come from. Often music genres so different have been deemed not reconcilable. In my personal vision, on the contrary, they meet and clash through some kind of “controlled chaos†which by juxtaposing the apparently opposite facets of those music genres allows me to show that they can be reconciled in one coherent form which reflects my musical personality. This effort to synthesise various form of music explains also the origin for both the name of my group GIORGIO OCCHIPINTI GLOBAL MUSIC NONETTO. The task behind this project is very important to me because I feel that the possibility to reconcile the various genres of music has not been explored enough.… In my compositional process “tradition†does not represent a blueprint to copy or deconstruct …Rather it is the entity that has shaped my development and has determined who I am today as a musician. This way the tradition – and in particular the 20th century tradition – is an example to follow in so far as it spurs the composer to search for new ways and forms of expression. My attempt is to create music that is new, the same way as composers from the past have attempted to create music that was new in their time. In my musical vision one way to create music that feels new is to juxtapose and clash music that appear very different from each other. Thus, juxtaposition and confrontation become the fuel for a new creativity. In addition, they allow to show that each attempt to categorise music is nothing but arbitrary and they provide me with the opportunity to highlight the similarities, rather than the differences, among the various music forms and genres.In each review of my past compositions, or in each profile of my career, journalists have attempted to trace the roots of my work and have tried to look for the mould out of which I have created my music. I have to admit that I have tried this analysis myself. The result of such self-evaluation, however, has led me to believe that my music is nothing else than the continuos setting up of a “controlled clash†between the multifarious sources of inspiration that come from outside and that – after they have entered my world – start influencing each other and transforming themselves in something completely different.I realize that words may be a flawed means to express these ideas.GIORGIO OCCHIPINTI GLOBAL MUSIC NONETTO is only an appendix of my creative universe, one of my numerous sonorous devices, what they am all my groups that I use in the application of my artistic conceptions. Really it is my custom build groups and heterogeneous projects where sometimes I am only a composer (my sequences for duo of cellos or for quartet of arcs, my “mottetti strumentali†for stings sextet and alto sax).My music is a gigantic living wrap, a box invaded from the declared chaos where each essence gives the impression to be out place; to the contrary all is perfectly framed in the centre of the musical discourse.….. From the liner notes of the CD “Revolution†(Between the Lines – Germany)
My REVOLUTION, insurrection - reaction a “CREATIVE RESISTANCE†around a torpid contemporary sound system and of a part of actual music; occlusive sense of the “not perceive (not feel)†what we have had near all the time and that is able to impress and inspire you; my exclusive conception of music and of the art that transcend from the marketing and from “easy and pop†induction .
Theese three compositions are a part extrapolated from a suite of more long duration ( with other two compositions) risen by a creative stimoulus that Franz Koglmannn and Ingrid Karl with the label Between the Lines gave me.
This recording is like a voyage toward my intimate artistic integrity and toward revolutionary elaboration of music…Heterogeneus language and creative universe’s emanations filtrated and enslaved into my exclusive code perpetually devoted to the screening of globality and circularity.
“ CANTATA PERPETUEL ET HYPNOTIQUE†is a composition that aim toward the archetype of the “mottettoâ€â€¦resorting to my music and all ideas that always characterized it, to my projections of music like a memory’s theme, as into the vocals “mottetti†in which the melody derived from the tradition of that period, a chant not written but transmited through an oral tradition. To create the variations I used any element until an extreme limit and any single sound of my compositions or also of the improvisations that I have closed in determinate canon.
“REVOLUTION†is just originated from determination to conduct toward total blast my supreme love to ancient music. A composition in two parts, two monumental rondo in which I wanted to manipulate this concept: the first is the experimantation, the second is “what is in the memoryâ€. Revolution is writed with the canons of contemporary music but imagining quite the ancient music. The writing is very dense and it avail it-self , in this case, of a classical writing , constituted by note and value, and of a modern writing constituted by grafic representation, arches of times and directions about sounds and notes that it is necessary to use.
“HISTOIRE D’UN SICILIAN A PARIS†is a composition inspired from a voyage, from my land and from the influences that it exert on me and on the world that is around. It is a form notable inserted, elaborated with progression that agree between their into an ideal centre of gravity of a musical subject. The musicians that I involved and that have been the heart with me of this project, are artist of a overhanging standard. I searched artists that have ability technical-creative and a sound absolutely coincident to my views…artists with a human greatness, with a big talent amalgamated into the art , the technique, the ingeniousness and also, probably most of all, the heart. This music can only be desired and loved; only in this way it will be able to be decoded. Otherwise it wouldn’t be able to have its life. Art is devotion, consecration, love; a spiritual voyage toward own ideals. It is a inestimable projection and “subjectively objective†of a cretivity. Art and a global music are a universal language, that we, revolutionaries that imagine the essence of things, identify with vehemence and longing to know the thousand “overtoure†of the human control and creative and of the experimantation.
GIORGIO OCCHIPINTIBBC MUSIC MAGAZINE(England)
Giorgio Occhipinti has produced an astonishing amalgam of jazz both straight ahead and free, European classical and avant-garde contemporary music. Sicilian folk and italian opera without either a hint of contrivance or a whiff of arbitrary eclecticism. For variety of mood and texture , and for sheer unrestrained virtuosity, these dark yet life-affirming musical meditations are hard to beat, and should establish Occhipinti as a considerable force in contemporary.
Chris Parker (England)------- HISTOIRE
between the lines btl 033
Bringing forth a pan-European take that fits the slogan Great Music, Ancient to Future, Italian pianist/composer Giorgio Occhipinti proves with this CD that high grade improv can come to fruition with very little reference to the music’s Afro-American roots.
In his work with bands like his own December Thirty Jazz Trio and trumpeter Pino Minafra’s Sudori, the pianist is easily able to connect to the Black Music part of the Art Ensemble slogan corrupted above, but HISTOIRE is more than that.
It’s an examination and evaluation of 20th Century musical currents in the form of three long compositions, the shortest of which is almost 16½ minutes long. Working from his Sicilian roots, Occhipinti mixes folk, contemporary classical, banda and operatic inflections. In a way this CD is a continuation of 2000’s nonet session GLOBAL MUSIC AND CIRCULAR THOUGHT (Jazz’halo TS 012), though it’s even more “Europeanâ€, confining the music to two reedists, one drummer and six string players including the leader’s piano.
Most distinctive of the pieces is the almost 19½ minute “Histoire d’un Sicilien à Parisâ€, which begins with tango-like pizzicato from the violin, violas, cello and bass and ends with the piano and strings combining for a gavotte-like Parisian musette. In between the slurred cello portamento, extended by bass clarinet continuum, suggests an off-centre tarantella as a secondary theme. Soon the piano enters displaying dynamic clusters and hammering double syncopation to what elsewhere would be heard as proper recital timbres. Switching to march tempo Occhipinti uses that beat to reintroduce the other players -- including tingling pizzicato strings, pedal point ostinato from the bass and thunderous kettle drums. As the percussion and keys define the militaristic bottom, hectoring, bass clarinet lines move polyrhythmically into wiggling coloratura.
More than halfway through, the pianist adds another theme that plays itself out in piano jazz syncopation with an overlay of slurred soprano saxophone lines. Finally, speedy, shrill strings reach a chamber orchestra-like crescendo which prefaces the light, musette-like theme.
With a reoccurring and transforming rhythms, the writing on “Cantata perpetuelle et hypnotique†at points resembles Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music with its perpetual motion. Potentially almost completely through-composed, the tune, based on mottetto or Roman Catholic liturgical music, finds each section advancing motifs, then giving way to counter motifs. Before the variations morph into something that sounds like romantic string writing, there’s a point where the strings and horns appear to trade fours in jazz fashion.
Picking up the initial ancient-to-future representation, “Revolution†is a two-part rondo that manipulates a dense, graphic composed score to subvert the ancient form with modern overtones. Here pedal pressure emphasized piano chords double and triple in tempo, the better to modulate romantic string lines into discordant higher registers. Reedy soprano saxophone sounds bring the piano lines down to a mid-tempo that soon turns atonal and appends complex, contrasting dynamics.
The canine-like reed snarls subverting the piano passages mirror what Occhipinti’s piano was doing viz a viz the strings earlier on in the first movement. At this point the violins, viola and cello recapitulate the rondo as kazoo-like squeals from the horn almost, but not quite, upset the form. In the end, coloratura trills and wheezes re-enter stage left from the horns along with some trick-tocking piano chords.
Keeping one hand in tradition and one in experimentation, the Sicilian pianist has proven once again that he’s someone to which close attention must be paid. To fully understand the evolution of European improvised music, Occhipinti is someone to be heard.
-- Ken Waxman
Record Label: BTL , Jazz Halò, NineWinds, ecc...
Type of Label: Indie