Today we’d like to introduce you to Carmen Marsico.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Carmen. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I was born and grew up in Italy, in a small town close to Venice, called Castelfranco Veneto. Daughter of southern Italian parents who in the 70s had to move to the North of Italy for work, I always felt a bit of a foreigner where I lived and I knew that my roots were somewhere else.
Music was always part of my life. I got my start in the church choir of the Cathedral of San Liberale, Castelfranco Veneto, singing Beethoven, Mozart, and Händel, and I did my first tour in Switzerland. Eventually, I discovered jazz thanks to my first voice teacher, Lilian Terry, an amazing jazz singer born in Cairo, Egypt from a British father and an Italian mother. She had recorded and performed with Dizzy Gillespie and Tommy Flanagan, among the others. In the 80s, Lilian decided to create, together with Dizzy, the “Dizzy Gillespie Popular School of Music” in Bassano del Grappa, Italy, that I had the fortune to attend. Shortly after, I became the vocalist for the local big band and collaborated with other jazz groups. While in Italy I also had the opportunity to study with Sheila Jordan and Mark Murphy, two amazing and inspiring jazz vocalists and educators.
As a matter of fact, ever since I can remember, I’ve always been singing and dancing, and this passion brought me to the States, to Boston, to study at Berklee College of Music and then at New England Conservatory where I pursued my master in Jazz Performance. While I was exploring jazz, my attention was always drawn to other musical influences and it was very natural for me to introduce my southern Italian roots into what I was doing musically. I think my time with Lilian Terry was influential in this. I realized especially that these elements would spontaneously show in my improvisation and in my compositions as well. During these years in Boston, I started two, for me, very important musical projects. The first one is Newpoli, a Mediterranean/Italian world music ensemble that I founded in 2003 together with singer Angela Rossi, percussionist Fabio Pirozzolo and guitarist/composer Björn Wennås. This band is very dear to me, for what it represents in terms of culture, tradition, and message to the world.
The musical tradition of Southern Italy has always been influenced by the surrounding areas, such as Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa and we decided to make these influences more clear, highlighting them in our original pieces and in our arrangements also of traditional pieces. Also, most of our compositions are inspired by the desire and hope of wanting to look at the Mediterranean Sea as a bridge between the diverse cultures that face this sea, and not as a wall that divides them. The second project is a jazz/world music quintet I formed with Björn Wennås, my partner in music and life. We perform our original jazz compositions as well as creative arrangements of material as diverse as U2, Tear for Fears, Cole Porter, Jobim, medieval sun-chants and 16th and 19th-century Neapolitan songs. I’m very excited to announce that our new album “The wave” will finally come out this spring!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road for an artist is never easy, but I do believe that when you struggle, you become stronger and beautiful art is created as a result! I’d like to talk about a song I wrote for Newpoli’s new album, “Mediterraneo”, that came out this past October. The song is titled So’ Emigrant’ and tells my story as a migrant. Back in Italy, growing up as a child, I felt like a foreigner in my own country. When I came to the United States, I found myself a little bit in the same situation. Fortunately, this feeling did not last long here, since in Boston and New York there’s such a multitude of different cultures living together and I found these cities very accepting. However, something odd has been happening every time I’ll go home. Since I now live in the US, going back home to Italy I often get called “l’americana”. All of this combined inspired me to write the words for this song. I tried to describe all these conflicting feelings, the nostalgia of my own country, having to adapt to a place where you feel like a stranger and the feeling of being treated like a stranger again when you return home. I think that this has been my main struggle, but at the same time, I’ll consider it my main strength.
Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
My family is from the mountainous and wild region of Basilicata, and this dramatic landscape inhabits my heart and can be heard in my music. I consider myself an adventurous singer who likes crossing different genres, from Mediterranean music to jazz, rock, and such. Movement is also a very important part of my performance! When I sing, I can’t stop dancing. I’ve been dancing all my life; I started with ballet, jazz and contemporary, then hip hop. At last, when I immersed myself in the traditions of the South of Italy and tirelessly dived deeper into my origins, I discovered the beautiful ancient styles of Southern Italian folk dances and I just had to learn them! With Newpoli I often have the possibility of teaching these dances in universities and school, and recently I started my own class at the Dante Alighieri Society, an Italian cultural center located in Cambridge. One of the wonderful things that happened with this class was the possibility to teach Italian American women and helped them rediscover their roots and traditions. Some of these dances can be traced all the way back to Dionysus cults of Magna Grecia and there is a history and captivating music that is just wonderful to share with my students. So, if I’m not singing, you can find me there every fourth Sunday of the month teaching the steps of pizzica and tammurriata, my two favorite Southern Italian folk dances!
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Every summer, my parents would take my brother and me, and we would drive down to Basilicata to visit my grandparents, uncles and aunts, and my cousins. It was a long ride with the car, about 9-10 hours, but I didn’t mind it at all. I had waited all year for this. My dad would play his favorite music, lots of folk music, and I would sing along for the whole trip while admiring the beautiful landscape of the different regions we would travel through. It’s incredible how much I absorbed during these trips. The sounds, the smells, the colors, they will always be with me because they made me what I am today.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.carmenmarsico.com
- Email: carmen@carmenmarsico.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carmen.worldmusic
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/newpolimusic
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/newpoli
- Other: http://newpolimusic.com
Image Credit:
Pic # 1, 5, 7: Maly Blomberg; Pic #2, 3, 4: Christine Vaindirlis; Pic #6, 8: Michael Kerpan; Pic #9 Francesca Lanza
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