By: Michael French, UC Davis College of Letters & Science
Professor Pierpaolo Polzonetti, UC Davis Department of Music, has collaborated with filmmaker Alberto Guerri on a new documentary that celebrates jazz in Italy. Umbria Jazz Feast will have its American premiere at UC Davis on Friday, Feb. 13 at 5 p.m. in the Ann E Pitzer Center. The screening is free and open to all.
What happens when Italian cuisine and wine are paired with global African music and served in a Medieval piazza in central Italy populated by local people, tourists, and migrants from the Global South? Umbria Jazz Feast is a research project that investigates multisensorial intersections during the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. It presents a new look at this festival by addressing the question: how is jazz perceived as part of a new global identity intersecting with local and global cuisine, art, and culture?
The purpose of the film is to document the cross-fertilization of global African-rooted American music and Italian art and cuisine, as experienced by people of different backgrounds and from different countries. The film focuses on the trans-cultural process of global cross-fertilization defined by Fabienne Darling-Wolf as ‘glocamalgamation’.
Umbria Jazz Feast is made possible by the generous support of the Eivind G. Lange ’77 and Mary G. Puma Engagement and Research in Italy Fund at the National Film School, Rome, Italy. At UC Davis, additional support was given by a Seed Grant for International Activities from Global Affairs as well as the College of Letters and Science and the Department of Music.Polzonetti is a musicologist specializing in music and food, opera, eighteenth-century instrumental music, jazz, and Cuban popular music. He is the author of Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet, the first book-length study to explore rituals of eating and drinking and gastronomic symbols in opera.
