Paolo Fresu and New York Voices shine at Sicilia Jazz Festival

Sicily swelters, even the locals suffering the intense heat. The second Sicilia Jazz Festival happily takes place largely in the capital Palermo’s open air, from a roofless former 16th century church to the 18th century Verdura Theatre, where the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana (OJS) are the house band, adding big band colours to artists as diverse as the great Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu, sometime Communards singer Sarah Jane Morris, New York Voices’ Manhattan Transfer-style vocalese, Eurovision runner-up Raphael Gualazzi and Christian McBride. Dianne Reeves and Snarky Puppy – who, like McBride, play after my stay – are the only headliners sans big band. This festival is deeply rooted in Sicily’s ancient brass band tradition, and its jazz adaptation during the Orchestra’s own near-half-century history.

The Marching Brass Big Band’s procession each festival evening through Palermo’s narrow alleys charmingly nods to that pre-jazz past. The OJS’s opening night collaboration with Fresu is more in the style of Sinatra’s swing orchestras, as they apply splashy brass to ‘I Thought About You’. Tonight’s version of its shifting line-up rarely takes flight, though, finding neither the classic big band’s jet-engine thrust, nor its Ellingtonian tone-colours. Fresu focuses on Sardinian ballads, romantic flourishes and pleasant sentiment, as when he plays the Neapolitan classic ‘’O Sole Mio’, Italy’s ‘Danny Boy’ in its overuse and fond nostalgic reserves.

‘’O Sole Mio’ draws a contented murmur from the crowd the next afternoon, too, during the Dutch Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw’s tribute to Sinatra (whose Sicilian heritage is celebrated in the island’s My Way Museum). It’s played with four muted trumpets, ending in a bittersweet sigh. Two OJS guests are the highlights, though. Flugelhornist Vito Giordano’s rueful, soulful solo is rich with character. He plays in his own time for a transfixing minute under pure blue skies. There’s no hurry or flourish, just sure trust in himself and the tune. OJS conductor Domenico Riina is more impish, giving an approving, “bellissimo” sign when a passing seagull solos. Vocalist Trintije Oosterhuis’s iPad lyric-cribbing for ‘Come Fly With Me’ is considerably less impressive.

Powerhouse singer Sarah Jane Morris, it transpires, had a big 1989 Italian hit with ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’, and her OJS gig is a love-in. ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ is dedicated to the pandemic’s premature dead. The song’s Hal David lyric makes the quotidian details of a woman’s life transcendent. Here, though, it’s carried by Morris’s gale-force personality, and interpolated, punchy protest “in tempo di guerra”, as she roars: “I don’t want to know about evil/I only want to know about love.” The crowd sings and lives this sentiment, Giordano contributes a soaring trumpet solo, and Morris ends her main set with a scream.

Raphael Gualazzi’s piano is raindrop-delicate with the OJS’s pianissimo brass early on, but blowsy, disco-era pop and Louis Prima dominate. New York Voices are much better and more simpatico with the Orchestra, who show their dextrous, small-group jazz credentials on ‘Love You Madly’, with its languid, sunny, certain Giordano solo. Percussive vocal harmonies are underscored by trombones on Stevie Wonder’s ‘Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing’, and baritone Peter Eldridge makes ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ a fragile, gauzy, lulling thing. Kim Nazarian’s vocal on Paul Simon’s ‘Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard’ confirms the New York earthiness which keeps the quartet’s heads above twee waters.

The smaller stages have their moments. In the vaulting sandstone of the Chiesa dello Spasimo, roofless and open to the blue evening sky, the Antonella Leotta Quartet play bossa, all brushes and double-bass. Valeria Milazzo’s ‘From Brazil to France’ set with the Pierpaolo Petta Quartet reveals a singer of conversational delicacy, and poised, finely tapering power. Among the Sicilian jazz students given a stage, the Federico Termini Trio’s Jackinthebox project stands out. Termini plays racing, semi-classical piano, and writes with a mellow prog mentality. He’s laughing at the end, exuding youthful optimism. I don’t see enough of soprano saxophonist Mederic Gebbia’s Magnetic Trio, expanded to fit French wild card Medédéric Collignon in a punkishly irreverent, heartfelt homage to Sidney Bechet. Collignon’s Arabic blues ululations, rubber hose- and cornet-playing breathe blazing music through every aperture.

Mostly, though, this is a festival where jazz feels like something which happened 50 years ago and more, frozen at the point of Orchestra Jazz Sicilia’s inception in its earlier, 1973 Brass Group Big Band incarnation.

The Brass Group Foundation is behind the OJS and the festival. Its septuagenarian maestro, pianist Ignazio Garsia, once chained himself to a piano outside the Sicilian Parliament and went on hunger strike for a month, to protest planned siphoning of jazz funding to classical and opera music. Sitting in the gardens of the Parco della Favorita listening to him passionately explain his proud efforts to promote jazz in an island he calls “one of the most difficult places to make music in the world”, shunned and scarred after the Mafia wars which killed thousands, and with jazz education in its undernourished infancy, the striking absence of wider jazz currents here makes more sense. This festival is born from battles Norway, say, won long ago. If it sometimes settles in the middle of the road, conservatoire students such as Termini, and Collignon’s smuggled punk import, may seed a braver future.