The North East Ska Jazz Orchestra celebrates their tenth anniversary with the release of their fourth album: Sulla Rotta dei Venti. A collection of ten original songs built around a strong Jamaican rhythm, with melodies influenced by traditional, sometimes ethnic music, and pop elements.
Traveling to the East, along the nearby Balkans, landing in sweltering Africa, moving up through southern Italy and then returning to the north-east, where the orchestra has its roots, Sulla Rotta dei Venti will take listeners on a trip around the world following the winds Bora, Levante, Mistral, Scirocco, Ponente…
This project represents an exploration of new musical worlds for the big band from the Italian north-east. At the same time, it reflects an internal search, and the attempt to insert their music at the center of space and time – even at the cost of going beyond the stylistic limits of the musical genres they bear in their name.
“To have a more popular sound and less “jazz-orchestra” than our previous works, this time we created mixed ensembles using instruments such as strings, accordion, flute, clarinet, horn, tuba, in addition to the standard lineup of sax, trumpets and trombones.
In fact, there have been 37 musicians involved in the recording of the album”, explains Max Ravanello, trombonist, composer and arranger of the project.
There remains, as a common thread running through all the albums, a great improvisational matrix, which shows its greatest effectiveness when the orchestra performs live.
Another feature of Sulla Rotta dei Venti is that the lyrics are almost completely in Italian, written and performed by singers Freddy Frenzy, Michela Grena and Rosa Mussin.
There are two exceptions: the Friulian language of the introduction by DJ Tubet in Piazza della Libertà and the Swahili of Nimi Muzima, a version of the song of the same name by the Italian-Congolese artist Thierry.
Sulla Rotta dei Venti, released on the Basque label Brixton Records, is available on CD and vinyl, as well as on digital plataforms.
North East Ska Jazz Orchestra is a 16-piece big band born in 2012, with the will to gather the many professional musicians active in the Jamaican and Afro-American music scene of the Italian’s northeast.
2014 saw the release of their very first EP, Music For Marikana. It was produced thanks to the support of the Non Profit Time For Africa, with
whom they have collaborated on the construction of an educational-cultural centre in the middle of the Marikana mining zone in South Africa.
The first album Stompin’ & Rollin’ was released in 2015, thanks to a successful crowdfund. It was recorded at Studio Jork in Koper (Slovenia), mixed and mastered at The Volcano Lounge, Sherman Oaks (California) by Brian Dixon, then released and distributed by Brixton Records (Bilbao, Spain).
Two years later, they released a 7” vinyl featuring two of the most important exponents of international ska, Fred Reiter (New York Ska Jazz Ensemble) and David Hillyard (Slackers, Rocksteady 7).
Later they also began collaborating with another band from the same region: Wicked Dub Division. Together they released the single Mama, which has exceeded 19 million views on YouTube.
In 2019 they presented the second LP North East Ska Jazz Orchestra. It collects nine original tracks composed by the members of the orchestra. Three years later they published Live Studio Session #1 with Wicked Dub Division, a work that includes 9 songs recorded live. This album consolidated the collaboration between the two bands and led them to perform on numerous stages, including the
Polish macro-event Pol’andRock.
In 2024 their fourth album Sulla Rotta Dei Venti was released: eleven original tracks written and composed by the band members and for the first time with lyrics in Italian.
North East Ska Jazz Orchestra is regularly engaged in European tours. They performed in Italy, France, Spain, Holland, Poland, Germany, Slovenia and Croatia, participating in prestigious festivals such as Rototom Sunsplash, Iboga Summer Festival and Freedom Sounds Ska. Festival.