14. TURIN

My dear Japanese friends,

Today I will introduce to you the city of TURIN.

Turin is obviously where TURIN JAZZ ROCK SCHOOL is born and it's the city where musicians of the catalogue Called shortly TJRS, are living.

Turin (in Italian "Torino") has always had an artistic personality, coupled with an high intuition towards new ways of artistic expression, so there's surely a jazz tradition in Turin, starting from the 50's or even before, and in the 70's we had a very famous club, called "Swing Club" in which generations of jazz musicians played, including a long list of giants, in different jazz styles...from Chet Baker to Jean Luc Ponty.

For Turin the seventies were, in every sense, the roaring seventies and, in that authentic golden age, the Swing Club became an irresistible venues for Turin's jazz lovers. The "Swing Club", with its tiny red lantern above, at number 18, Via Botero. (Gian Carlo Roncaglia one of the most important all time Italian jazz writer - it's an extract from "33" by arti & mestieri
(www.aem33.com/www.myspace.com/artimestieri33)

There's a live recording of a band "before" arti & mestieri that's "Il Sogno di Archimede" with 4 members of arti & mestieri, that will be published later, this year.

Turin was the capital of Italy, before Rome.

The Italian Television began its broadcasts in an old building in centre of Turin. The cinema started in Turin, long before Rome's Cinecitta'
On 7h November 1896, the first movie show by the Lumiere brothers, took place at number 33, Via Po, in Turin. The first Italian film companies, the movie stars, the historic colossals, all started here. Now we're content with only the Mole Antonelliana's Cinema Museum, albeit one of the finest museums in the world.

(Sergio Ariotti - RAI and writer and producer for TV and Theathre)
It's an extract from "33" by arti & mestieri.

P.S. You can see Mole Antonelliana on the photo.

Turin's mood is similar to Paris, for certain aspects it's closer to Paris more than to other Italian city, even in Northern Italy, like Milan.

A fascinating aspect of Italy (one of the many fascinating faces Italy has) is that in Italy you can find really big differences as far as art, culture or food, not to speak of dialects, and so on, between different parts of Italy and not just between south and north or Centre Italy and Island. And sometimes even between close cities.

This high degree of differentiation is really a wonderful palette of colours of many different intensities...it's Italy!

So Turin had and has a clear artistic identity.

At the same he's of the greatest industry in the world of Cars, as FIAT, that's also owner of legendary names like Ferrari, Lancia, Alfa Romeo that are quite famous all over the world.

So here we see one the many contrasts on the many faces of a city, artistic on one side and master in car industry on the other and in the 70's when arti & mestieri were born we had a lot of tensions and contrasts as well, between students and university and secondary schools, between workers and Fiat.

In the seventies we had the appearance of a new generations of young musicians in Turin that, following Sixties revolution started to blend rock with the jazz tradition of Turin.

There's a lot mot more to say about Turin, as you've seen also in part during the last Winter Olympic Games, so we'll talk about the city, in the future and Turin will be on fo the recurring item on this blog, in some ways.

Next chapter of this blog will be TURIN JAZZ ROCK SCHOOL
(very soon)

till then ( and after)

stay happy

Beppe