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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
