The Festival Rumori nell'Isola in September is a music festival that marries the different styles of jazz music with experimentation and improvisation. It was founded in 2002 on the island of Ventotene and takes place the first week of September, when the evenings are sweet and the climate is soft.
The atmosphere of the Belvedere terrace and the Piazzette in front of the church and the castle of Ventotene are magical and the concerts are animated by videos, documentaries, short films, but also figurative art and dance, with experiences like action painting.
Rumori nell Isola is a festival now known throughout Italy thanks to the many well-known and emerging musicians who come from the whole world to be on stage every year.
Some groups perform songs of the popular Italian tradition of the 1900s revisited in a modern key, which transport the audience on a musical journey with arrangements of jazz mix and rhythms that invite dance.
Other groups offer concerts in which jazz or bossanova standard songs coexist with old arias, popular songs, international songwriting, Neapolitan songs.
There are also groups that combine jazz with all Mediterranean traditions.
All concerts are free admission and start at 10 pm in the evening.
The review also has great historical value. Many musical performances are introduced by readings of memoirs and testimonies provided since the end of the 18th century by political prisoners who stayed on the island.
In recent years the following groups are among those that have played: the Trio of accordionist Antonello Salis, the trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini and the Persian percussionist Mohssen Kasirossafar, the dancer Paola Campagna, the Nexus (tenor Daniele Cavallanti, Tiziano Tononi, Achille Succi and Tito Mangialajo), TC GANG by Tony Cerqua, Sousaphonix of Mauro Ottolini, the October Song project by Eugenio Colombo and Raffaella Misiti, Roberto Mazzoli, Alessandro Girotto, Triology, Etta Lomasto Quartet, the guitarist Roberto Taufic and the clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi within the "Core/Coraçao" project by Maria Pia De Vito under the supervision of Chico Buarque, the drummer Alessandro Marzi, Giacinto Piracci, Ruggero Artale Afro Percussion Quartet, Emiliano De Luca, Simone Padovani, Giovanni Maier, Luciano Watches, Elena Paparusso, the Trio D'Erme-Gentile-Raponi, the actor Daniele Biacchesi & the pianist Gaetano Liguori, Aksas mania, LUZ, Nando Citarella.
Some of the artists who participated in the festival were so fascinated by the beauty of Ventotene that they recorded discs and videos dedicated to the island.
Karl Potter & Ventotene Percussion Group
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Picture by Jessica Lucchin[/caption]
Karl Potter, an internationally renowned African-American musician, has taught percussion lessons for years. In 2004 he gave birth to "the island of the drums", a group of young people who formed a singular band, a sort of all-island orchestra: the Ventotene Percussion Group, with the involvement of many young islanders who followed in his wake.
Karl Potter came once a month to do his seminars for the boys with whom he managed to weave a dense musical plot through their warm sound carpet of talking drums, djembé, electric guitars and other ethnic instruments.
At the beginning, the Ventotene Percussion Group was a group of young people from Ventotene who were passionate about music, who were joined on some occasions by others who wanted to play, to improvise and jam together. It has made several concerts on the mainland and the so-called "Dance", released for the record label Finisterre in 2005 is now exhausted and unobtainable. You can listen to the songs from the guys of Ventotene live at Rumori nell’Isola.
Women in live music at Rumori nell’Isola
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Picture by Alessio Castagna[/caption]
On the occasion of the festival, the singer Maria Pia De Vito and the double bassist Silvia Bolognesi were the protagonists of the music video "Suoni dal carcere", shot and played live in 2012 in the location of the Bourbon Prison of Santo Stefano. It was a unique event, a world premiere. The technique, the virtuosity and the soul of the Italian singer and bassist have brought that performance into the musical history.
In 2015 Maria Pia De Vito brought her music inside the festival involving the Ensemble Burnogualà, a chorus of 22 voices directed by her, who became the key voices of a viral video thanks to a wonderful vocal performance in water, in one of the more impressive places of the island, the ancient eel tank of Ventotene.
Maria Pia De Vito in 2016 returned to Ventotene and went on stage again with the Ensemble Burnogualà and, together with Rita Marcotulli, she experimented and developed songs that gave life to the album "Moresche and other inventions", released in 2018.
In 2016 the spectacular performance in the water together with the Ensemble Burnogualà was replicated and made even more special and impressive by the involvement of the public, who was able to freely participate in a moment of music in a spectacular setting.
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