Biography
Italian trumpeter and composer Andrea Pandolfo has pursued an unusually broad spectrum of musical styles, ranging from Baroque repertoire through jazz and folk traditions to klezmer and scores for theater, cinema, and broadcast media. A native of Rome, he earned his trumpet diploma from the Morlacchi Conservatory of Perugia in 1993. During the following decade he performed with Klezroym, whose “New Hebrew music,” as described by KlezmerShack, yielded six albums and roughly four hundred live appearances; Pandolfo contributed to the ensemble’s ambitious theatrical works, among them the World War II narrative Saccarina, 5 al soldo. In 1997 he became a member of Clara Graziano’s Circo Diatonico, whose programs draw on Italian folk sources, Gypsy music, and Balkan styles; the group held a residency on the RAI Due radio network in 2005.
Pandolfo began trumpet instruction in 2003 and joined the faculty of the Scuola di Musica 55 in Trieste in 2013. The same year he won the Tartini Conservatory’s Jazz Instrumentalists Competition. Additional projects soon followed. The Travel Notes Project, which he created with Paolo Pandolfo, has toured extensively across Europe, presenting original compositions scored for viol, modern trumpet, voice, percussion, and strings. In 2008 he established Out of Tune, an ensemble conceived “to experiment 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.
Pandolfo launched Trio Caterina in 2013; the group, which also includes accordion, merges Baroque material with klezmer and Gypsy elements. He appears on nearly twenty albums and has composed for film, for stage works such as the Chekhov adaptation Tre Sorelle, and for television. In 2017 he took part in Kind of Satie, an album combining Satie’s own pieces, improvisations on those pieces, and new works that investigate Satie’s poetic principles.
Pandolfo began trumpet instruction in 2003 and joined the faculty of the Scuola di Musica 55 in Trieste in 2013. The same year he won the Tartini Conservatory’s Jazz Instrumentalists Competition. Additional projects soon followed. The Travel Notes Project, which he created with Paolo Pandolfo, has toured extensively across Europe, presenting original compositions scored for viol, modern trumpet, voice, percussion, and strings. In 2008 he established Out of Tune, an ensemble conceived “to experiment 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.
Pandolfo launched Trio Caterina in 2013; the group, which also includes accordion, merges Baroque material with klezmer and Gypsy elements. He appears on nearly twenty albums and has composed for film, for stage works such as the Chekhov adaptation Tre Sorelle, and for television. In 2017 he took part in Kind of Satie, an album combining Satie’s own pieces, improvisations on those pieces, and new works that investigate Satie’s poetic principles.
Albums
