Dai, Ciccio!

Dai, Ciccio! draws on the golden age of Italian song, the swing of Carosone, the lyricism of Modugno, the Neapolitan canzone that shaped a century of popular music, and plays it with the rigour of a working jazz band and an unapologetic sense of celebration. This is not nostalgia. It is repertoire treated as living material: arranged, swung, and improvised on, with the warmth of the tradition fully intact.

The musicianship is the point. Lead vocalist Cristina Russo is an opera singer who defected to a jazz band, an Italian-Australian soprano whose career spans Victorian Opera, Barrie Kosky's Saul, and recorded vocals for Babylon Berlin, the most successful German television export in history. Anchoring the rhythm section, double bassist Tom Flenady and swing guitarist Adam Russo bring playing honed across the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, OzManouche, and the National Folk Festival. Completing the line-up, and familiar to this festival, are saxophonist Jon Hunt, who has played with Paul Kelly and toured with Lauryn Hill and Vince Giordano's Nighthawks, and drummer Ronny Ferella, a thirty-year fixture of the Melbourne scene whose group IshIsh has played Italy's Umbria Jazz Festival.

What results is music of real craft that refuses to take itself too seriously: virtuosic, generous, and built to move a room. The songs carry the texture of long lunches and family singalongs, but the playing would hold its own on any stage.

Dai, Ciccio! means "come on, man!". It is an invitation, equal parts affection and impatience, to sit close and listen to the music of the old country played as it deserves.