Over the decades, instrumentalists, composers, singers and passionate organizers with tenacity, quality and spirit of initiative have established themselves in the Italian jazz scene.
Theirs was not a subordinate or lateral role to the male role but also autonomous in terms of technical-expressive approach and music writing.
The first protagonist of this path of appropriation of a well-defined artistic identity was undoubtedly pianist Dora Musumeci: after graduating from the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples, she approached jazz in the late 1940s, playing together with historical names of Afro-American music, such as Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie.
He released several records with his own lineup and in 1968 participated in a historic evening at the Piper in Rome in honor of prestigious guest Lionel Hampton, for the occasion accompanied by Marcello Rosa ‘s Swinging Dance Band and other Italian jazz musicians, including Romano Mussolini.
In the years that followed, the increasingly insistent demand for gender equality by the female population in the work, artistic and cultural spheres generated a substantial change with regard to the Italian social and political order.
Women active in multiple artistic fields feel the need to express their own language, to tell their emotions, feelings and ideas freely through music, film, literature, theater and ballet.
An impervious road to be taken with determination and strong-willed passion, propped up by numerous obstacles, but contributing over the years to the improvement of the entire cultural sector in our country, gradually freed from preconceptions and leaning toward a radical renewal in form, but especially in content.
This revolution will reach its apogee in the late 1970s and the following decade. At that very time, the first festival dedicated to female instrumentalists active within the international jazz scene was born in Italy.
The creators of the event are Francesca Noè, organizer of the Murales, photographer Nona Melis, Fausta Gabrielli and Francesca Brasi, coordinators of the Ziegfield club, and Picchi Gallarati, wife of Pepito Pignatelli, historic founder in Rome of the Blue Note and Music Inn jazz clubs. Always by her husband’s side in his bold entrepreneurial ventures driven by an unreserved passion for jazz, Picchi moves in an environment consisting mainly of men. Before long, however, the number of female fans and young musicians in the Music Inn audience gradually began to increase.
The festival held in the grounds of Villa Borghese’s Lake Garden has an emblematic title “Music is a Wonderful Woman,” and features leading names in avant-garde and traditional jazz, including pianists Joanne Brackeen, Amina Claudine Myers and Patrizia Scascitelli, singers Betty Carter, Jeanne Lee and Sheila Jordan, and cornist and pianist Sharon Freeman.
At that time Patrizia Scascitelli took part in the new Italian jazz movement, made up of young musicians gravitating around pianist and composer Giorgio Gaslini, who taught the jazz course at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome and later at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan.
The pianist participates in several independent festivals organized in the capital and Milan, records records with her group, appears on TV shows and gives a series of concerts in the United States.
Other female figures in Italian jazz are Tiziana Ghiglioni and Rita Marcotulli. In the 1980s Tiziana Ghiglioni established herself internationally as a performer gifted with great expressiveness and vocal technique, able to approach with ease both traditional jazz material and that of free improvisation borrowed from the radical avant-garde of American free jazz.
The well-known critic Arrigo Polillo points to her as “the only real Italian jazz singer who has appeared on the scene, in our country, for several years now….”
Rita Marcotulli, pianist and composer, has approached the traditions of Brazilian, African and Indian music over the years, shaping her own jazz language.
In 1988 he moved to Sweden, staying there until 1992; further experience that gave him the opportunity to collaborate with musicians from the northern European jazz scene, Palle Danielsson, Jon Christensen, Marilyn Mazur, Tore Brunborg, and, in addition, play with drummer Billy Cobham and U.S. saxophonist Dewey Redman.
These and other female figures of considerable artistic depth, including the new protagonists of the Italian jazz scene, continue to pursue their own musical thinking with an unstoppable desire to glimpse new and unexpected avenues on the horizon.
Paolo Marra
Note: Piper was a club located on Via Tagliamento in Rome, a hangout for the new beat and rock generation of the late 1960s
Bibliographic source: Music is woman, Marco Molendini, The Messenger, June 8, 1979
