The North East Ska Jazz Orchestra celebrates its tenth anniversary with the release of its 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 platforms.