# Review: Refined work with rhythmic and harmonic cells at the Italy – 2025 South Tyrolean Jazz Festival Alto Adige: Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2025/09/08/review-refined-work-with-rhythmic-and-harmonic-cells-at-the-italy-2025-south-tyrolean-jazz-festival-alto-adige-photos/
- Published: 2025-09-08T09:52:50+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The 43rd edition of the South Tyrolean festival, the third one curated by Stefan
Festini Cucco, Max von Pretz and Roberto Tubaro, saw many new developments at the
2025 South Tyrolean Jazz Festival Alto Adige.**

The festival is becoming increasingly creatively progressive, while remaining true
to its core philosophy of love for the homeland and the desire to share its beauty,
creating the backdrop for a special look at European jazz and the younger generation.

This mix makes it one of the most original events in Italy and beyond.

This festival offered 60 concerts, included a study of “Sound” – an invitation to
listen to how sound, transcending the boundaries of musical genres, can influence
space – be it industrial or natural – and vice versa.

![Echoes of Industry - De Rock coverband uit Brabant - Echoes of Industry](https://
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Industrial Echos

An interaction that began at the opening of festivals such as Industrial Echos, 
in a former aluminum recycling plant, now a technological innovation park, between
some members of the excellent Dutch orchestra Brainteaser, combining sophisticated
improvisation and contemporary composition, and then joined by the orchestra itself,
led by keyboardist and composer Tijn Wiberga, with his wide and assertive sound,
a great mix of brass, strings, rhythm section and use of ready-made samples, for
an open-air concert full of energy and fun.

A completely different kind of interaction between the nine musicians of the Brainteaser
group itself the following day at Floating Through Sound with the natural sounds
of the forest climbing up Monte San Vigilio and the listeners who, one by one, ascend
on a chairlift suspended in the air, with sometimes light and sometimes decisive
improvisations of the musicians scattered along the route, which intertwine for 
a few moments and echo the pulsations of the environment: an unusual and dreamlike
listening experience, an intangible and fleeting beauty, an emotional impact.

![](https://i0.wp.com/traccedijazz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/cbt-frontale_img_8508_gpichler.
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Floating Through Sound/Alessandro Fongaro

Also noteworthy is the presence, in the Dutch orchestra, of Italians Nicolò Ricci(
sax), Federico Calcagno (bass clarinet), and Alessandro Fongaro (double bass). Along
with Sun-Mi Hong on drums, they form the Pietre quartet, led by Fongaro, who performed
in the splendid setting of the Bressanone Civic Library that same evening.

This group, despite only being in existence for a few years, offers a promising 
performance, with the Korean’s drums providing decisive, as well as tactful, support,
along with the propulsiveness of the double bass, the sometimes nervous and angular,
sometimes sunny melodies of the two wind instruments, and Calcagno’s mastery and
improvisational verve, which had already been evident within Brainteaser.

![Tuk Music | Nicolò Ricci](https://i0.wp.com/www.tukmusic.com/upload/catalogo_artisti/
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Nicolò Ricci

The fertile encounters that can happen on Dutch soil were further demonstrated by
the fast-paced set by the duo Raw Fish, featuring the remarkable and vibrant Italian
Giovanni Iacovella on drums and the equally compelling Danish guitarist Teis Semey,
both former Amsterdam housemates.

The backdrop was the Sudwerk club, which for several years has been the festival’s“
home” for the experimental nightlife crowd, and which has hosted, among others, 
Signe Emmeluth, a leading saxophonist on the Scandinavian scene, and her quartet
Amoeba: experimental music, close to both the most creative and free jazz and contemporary
sounds, music rooted in a clear and rigorous compositional concept, yet highly dialogic
and with a multiplicity of sonic moods, and it is a music of female authority that
we would like to hear more and more.

![](https://i0.wp.com/traccedijazz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/emme-close-up_20250703_sudwerk_emmeluth_s_amoeba_raw_sario-
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Signe Emmeluth’s Amoeba

The Südtirol Jazz Festival Alto Adige is an adventurous festival, increasingly attentive
to contemporary languages, uninhibited by genre. Francesco Guerri’s intense solo
was equally adventurous, simultaneously ancient and modern in tone, a work where
improvisation intertwines with songwriting, with extensive references to “Su Mimmi
non si spara!”

Refined work with rhythmic and harmonic cells, a variety of techniques, and even
percussive use of the instrument, the gesture that liberates the writing, becoming
almost hypnotic as it connects with the environment and the listener—here, a distillery
and a highly attentive audience—for music that is always on point and capable of
communicating.

Equally adventurous, the disruptive and irreverent performance by Delphine Joussein
and her solo project Calamity is in perfect harmony with the exhibition pavilion
that welcomes her, at night: because if the French flutist masters the idiom of 
experimental jazz and does not shy away from ballads, even in her voice, here she
programmatically reveals the “dark side of the flute”, a “sharp knife”, as she herself
defines it, which ferociously, between loops, effects, distortions, veers towards
a dark and apocalyptic-flavored noise, and this too is a great listen.

![](https://i0.wp.com/traccedijazz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/close-up_2-20250703_fiera_delphine_joussein_calamity_raw_sario-
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Delphine Joussein

There were many offerings that this writer was unable to attend, but which nonetheless
reflect the festival’s open and musically cosmopolitan direction: such as the duo
of Camila Nebbia and Dan Kinzelman, the quartet of German trombonist Antonia Hausmann,
the dialogue between Mongolian-born singer Enji Erkhem and drummer Simon Popp, both
based in Munich, or the new “Jazz Chemistry” section, which saw artists who had 
never played together interact in “other” locations around the city—the bookshop,
the record store, the yoga studio—in a spirit of the unexpected.

Among others, Filippo Vignato and Andreas Tausch, Camila Nebbia and Andreas Lettner,
Francesco Guerri and Kenji Herbert, and Signe Emmeluth and Kit Downes, the latter
also present at the festival in the excellent chamber trio Szelest led by German
guitarist Ronny Graupe and Swiss singer Damaris Brendle, here interpreting the lyrics
of Lucia Cadotsch (a regular member of the trio, see “Newfoundland Tristesse”, 2025),
as well as revisiting some standards in a very personal way.

![](https://i0.wp.com/traccedijazz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/noi_sdraio_img_8321_gpichler.
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As in past editions, the program also features a re-set to a silent film—with Dan
Kinzelman’s saxophone playing alongside De Beren Gieren, punctuating and expertly
directing the viewing of the bizarre and disturbing 1918 “Der Mandarin—Story of 
a Madman”—and the usual event at the Dalle Nogare Foundation, which once again successfully
combined art and music with two truly memorable concerts.

In the first of these, the trio Fade In (with two albums under their belt, the 2020
EP “Introspection” and 2022’s “Live Fast, Die A Legend,” Clean Feed Records) showed
us another side of Federico Calcagno’s versatility. He joined Marco Luparia on drums
and Pietro Elia Barcellona on double bass in a sonic journey that broadens jazz 
and contemporary music with influences from the East, in its various forms (Indonesia,
India, Japan). This excellent interplay moves from reflective and meditative atmospheres,
almost minimalist due to the continuous work on ritualistic repetitions, to a nervous
and contemporary interplay between writing and improvisation.

Excellent mastery of dynamics and crescendos, non-idiomatic use of instruments, 
alternating between the lead and the follower, engaging in a confident dialogue.

![](https://i0.wp.com/traccedijazz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/trio_orizzontale_20250705_fondazione_antonio_dalle_nogare_stiftung_fade_in_foto_dfiorentino-
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Fade In

Following, the quartet The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters features Anglo-Iranian
leader Mariam Rezaei – an artist who, as a turntablist in recent years, has increasingly
gained recognition in a jazz context – Mette Rasmussen on saxophone, Gabriele Mitelli
on pocket trumpet and electronics, and Lukas König, a frequent guest in Bolzano,
on drums.

A powerful, happy blend of personalities and moods, these four musicians are among
the most interesting in European creative music, in the spirit of total improvisation:
pure, vehement energy and tight rhythms that also leap from more intimate moments
to explosive crescendos.

And while the 2025 edition saw the return of mountain walks with musicians (Jazz&
Hike, with Kinzelman and Vignato at the forefront), alongside the new “Jazz for 
Kids” section, featuring afternoon workshops for children led by Greta Marcolongo
in a 19th-century fort now a museum, this year too, as in recent editions, the evocative
power of places like the ancient mines of the Ridanna Valley was not lacking, first
hosting an elegant solo by Rainer Baas, and then, on the last day of the festival,
with Zoe Pia interacting on clarinet and launeddas with the ancient tradition of
her Sardinian homeland, the tenor singing of the Tenores di Orosei “Antoni Milia.”

![BEN VAN GELDER, RAINER BAAS in HAN BENNINK » Kulturni dom Nova Gorica](https://
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Rainer Baas

And they are sacred songs, as if carved in stone, verse after verse, or more light
and lively secular songs, which Pia accompanies, sometimes preparing the passage
with free improvisations or introducing melodies, sometimes following and supporting
the singing of the four tenor players, with delicacy and respect, and a harmony 
of intent.

It was the Tenores who first approached this artist, and their desire to establish
a fruitful dialogue with contemporary music was spot on: and there could have been
no better way to close—with the “coda” of the usual nighttime party at the Sudwerk—
a festival whose breadth of vision and the ability to allow the intense experience
of so many individual moments to sediment as an experience in one’s own sonic experience,
Erlebnis and Erfahrung, will be missed now that autumn is approaching.

![](https://i0.wp.com/traccedijazz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/tenores_per-tracce_dsf2434florian-
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Zoe Pia & Tenores of Orosei “Antoni Milia”

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