Victo 40th Anniversary Super Sale. Listening to Minafra’s “Sud Ensemble” is about reactivating our hidden perceptive faculties (in the widest sense), it is about discerning planets during daylight and to suddenly realize that these planets must have spun out of one of these Black Holes in the contemporary music universe that no one of us, due to the so-called age of information, expects anymore. The “Sud Ensemble” is Minafra’s own thing and as Italy is still a stunningly complex country, with its climates, scenery, food and wine, faces, hand gestures, cultural traditions, languages and music changing every hundred kilometers or so, it is of importance to know that he is from Ruvo di Puglia, a little town in the South near Bari. Ruvo di Puglia is very well known in Italy for its “Settimana Santa”, the celebrations during the “Passion Week”, the first record of this longstanding tradition dating back to 1651.

Nowadays, his music deals in the main emotional currencies of love, loss, laughter, sadness, joy and things of that nature. And, the “Sud Ensemble” is quite frankly, for several reasons, one of the best jazz ensembles around. Minafra’s is all about his Italian origins, the European tradition, and he uses the jazz method to reinvent them. His pieces are very scenic and narrative in the full-scale Hollywood sense (or is it Cine Citta??) of these words.

Markus Muller (art historian and editor of Jazzthetik)