Andrea Pandolfo

Italian trumpeter and composer Andrea Pandolfo has been active in an astonishingly wide variety of genres, from Baroque music to jazz and folk, from klezmer to music for theater, film, and television. Born in Rome, Pandolfo graduated with a trumpet degree from the Morlacchi Conservatory of Perugia in 1993. In the 1990s he played with the band Klezroym, whose "New Hebrew music" (KlezmerShack) led to six CDs and some 400 concerts. Pandolfo had a hand in the group's large-scale dramatic pieces, including the World War II narrative Saccarina, 5 al soldo. In 1997 he joined the band Circo Diatonico, led by accordionist Clara Graziano. The band's repertoire is inspired by Italian traditional music, Gypsy music, and Balkan music; the group had a residence at the RAI Due radio network in 2005. In 2003 Pandolfo began teaching the trumpet, and since 2013 he has been on the faculty at the Scuola di Musica 55 in Trieste. There, he won the Tartini Conservatory's Jazz Instrumentalists Competition in 2014. Meanwhile, he formed several other new ensembles. One was the Travel Notes Project, which has performed all over Europe with original music by Pandolfo himself and Paolo Pandolfo, for viol, modern trumpet, voice, percussion, and strings. In 2008 Pandolfo founded Out of Tune, with the aim of experimenting with sounds outside of usual genres and instrumentation patterns. "Out of Tune is a cross between a wind chamber ensemble and a military band," he wrote. Trio Caterina, which Pandolfo founded in 2013 and which also featured accordion, added Baroque music to klezmer and Gypsy elements. Pandolfo has been featured on nearly 20 CDs and has written music for films, stage productions (including Tre Sorelle, an adaptation of Chekhov's Three Sisters), and television programs. In 2017 he was featured on the album Kind of Satie, an album of music by Satie, improvisations on Satie's music, and new compositions exploring principles of Satie's poetics.
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