The Permanent Jazz Festival

The Rise of Europe and the Future of Jazz.

- Thomas Conrad

The first jazz festival I ever attended outside the United States was in Melbourne, Australia, in 2005. That year, the Umbria Jazz organization of Italy helped run the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, and the concerts were full of Italian musicians. They were all new to me.

Francesco Cafiso played on the first night. He had the purest, most powerful alto saxophone sound I had ever heard. He was 15 years old, and played ferocious, intricate, mind-boggling bebop. Charlie Parker was back from the dead. I thought I was delirious from jet lag. No 15-year-old could be that good.

He was. He played “Cherokee” (no one plays “Cherokee” anymore) and laid it to waste. There were other stunning Italians in Melbourne, like Stefano Bollani and Danilo Rea. I thought Bollani might be the best living jazz pianist not named Keith Jarrett. Again I suspected jet lag, but it turned out to be true.

The following summer, in 2006, I went for the first time to the actual Umbria Jazz Festival, in Perugia, Italy. Cafiso was there. He performed twice with an Italian orchestra, using the original arrangements from the Charlie Parker with Strings albums. He played his own soaring improvisations, in that singing, celestial tone I now knew. (Check out the album Francesco Cafiso & Strings: A Tribute to Charlie Parker, Umbria Jazz, 2005.) I heard more formidable Italians in Perugia, like Enrico Rava and Giovanni Guidi.

I returned to Italy many more times, and have now been to festivals in Spain, Poland, Serbia, Norway, Estonia, Romania, Latvia, Macedonia, and Bosnia. European jazz festivals are the hang of your life. To be in Arena Santa Giuliana, in Perugia, on a summer night, the church steeples of the hill town above you lit by a full moon, is to know