Music
Press
“Lu is a world music talent with extraordinary potential. Trained classicaly, she weaves Renaissance and Baroque elements, Middle Eastern sounds and African rhythms into seamless musical tapestries”.
- D.H.
“Fascinating and magnificent: Rumì is a great record which crowns a great artist’s birth”.
- G.M.
“The many dialects of Italy can give the emotion of truly exotic world tunes. Luisa Cottifogli, with the stage name of Lu, uses Romagnolo dialect to produce sounds which range from Area (progressive rock) to suggestions between afro and celtic. How brilliant she is!”.
- A.A.
“Luisa really owns a high-class voice and keeps her balance among ethnic roots, contemporaneous music and the right dose of electronics”.
- F.Z.
“Experimentation, jazz, research on tradition then Quintorigo, Mozart, video-installations. Over all the varied singing of a free artist”.
- S.Z.
“Lu’s voice, sometimes sharp, sometimes soft, always rises steadily from music which skilfully combines traditional instruments with technology”.
- R.C.
“A wonderful experimentalist vocal style and a soft electronic background magically meet the early Romagnolo dialect and a clear oriental feature”.
- G.M.
Discography
- Milingo by Lucio Dalla (Pressing-Ricordi 1995);
- In terra Zapatista, AAVV (Radio Onda d’Urto, 1996);
- Macramè by Ivano Fossati (Sony 1996, with Trilok Gurtu, Tony Levin, Riccardo Tesi, Mario Arcari);
- Tempus Fugit, Variazioni, AAVV (Vergin, 1996);
- Capelas Imperfeitas (DDT – 1996);
- Metissage (Il Manifesto - 1997), in Arabic and Italian;
- Aiò Nenè (2000) first cd as soloist and composer;
- Marlevar (Forrest Hill Records - 2002);
- All Children in school per Unicef , AAVV (Forrest Hill Records, 2004);
- Rumì (Forrest Hill Records - 2006) second cd as soloist and composer, in collaboration with Leo Z, Serse Mai (Vasco Rossi' arranger) and Mauro Malavasi;
- Il cannone (Exess – 2006) with Quintorigo band;
- Quinto (Exess – 2006) with Quintorigo band;
- Quintorigo play Mingus (Exess – 2007) with Quintorigo band;
- Rabazera (Cà Vaina, 2007) with Michele Patricelli;
- Bruno Lauzi e il Club Tenco, AAVV (Alabianca, 2007).
Photos
Bio
LUISA COTTIFOGLI - www.luisacottifogli.com
In a continuous vocal research, her artistic experiences move from radio transmissions to soundtracks, from theater to contemporary jazz and world music.
In Bologna she obtained a diploma both in singing, in the Academy of Music G. B. Martini, and in acting in the Antoniana Academy for performing arts. In the same town she plays in the Company of Teatro delle Moline and she sings as soprano in the Choir of the Municipal Theatre.
Often, she plays multimedia performances where her polyhedral vocal expressions perfectly convey with video installations. Such as in Velocità di fuga, assolo for voice, live electronics and Gian Luca Beccari’s images; or in Aiò Nenè where some Italian dialects are mixed with many different music styles with a video background always produced by Beccari’s himself. In Rumì, texts are written in dialect from Romagna and video installation is by Andrea Bernabini’s; also the vernissage of the italo-american painter Antonia Ciampi in the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome is a multimedia performance produced on commission.
She collaborates as a singer with RAI (Italian Public Broadcasting Stations), TVE (Spanish National Network), ORF (Austrian Public Radio), RSI (Italian Radio in Swiss) and in Rai Sat 2000.
She performs in many theatres and festivals in Italy, United States of America, India, Austria, France, Great Britain, Swiss and Spain.
She collaborates with Giovanna Marini, Glauco Mauri, Teresa De Sio, The Chieftains, David Riondino, Andrea Parodi, only to mention some of them. She records with Ivano Fossati, Lucio Dalla, Flavio Premoli (PFM), Nicola Campogrande and Roberto Cacciapaglia and some of her songs and compositions are in many international compilations.
After Aiò Nenè (2000), in 2006 Forrest Hill Records produces Rumì, her second cd as composer, where she collaborates with Leo Z., Serse Mai and Mauro Malavasi. Rumì is selected for Premio Tenco 2006 (the second world music best cd).
Luisa Cottifogli performs with Metissage band, singing in Arabic and Italian (Metissage, 1997, Il Manifesto) and with Marlevar, singing in Provencal (Marlevar, 2002, Forrest Hill Records). Since 2005 she sings in Quintorigo Band and records some cd (Il cannone, Quinto, Quintorigo play Mingus) and two single tracks (Redemption song and La nonna di Frederick).
In 2007 she makes her first performance in Asteroide Lindgren, a chamber music opera written by Federica Iacobelli with music by Daniele Furlati and in June 2008 another debut in Ravenna Festival: Anita dei due mondi, a new multimedia performance where Luisa Cottifogli sings and plays remembering Anita Garibaldi with music composed by herself and Gianni Pirollo.
In January 2009 Luisa Cottifogli, together with Quintorigo Band, receive a very important admission from Musica Jazz review: they are awarded as the first jazz band in Italy, the top one, with the performance Quintorigo play Mingus.
HER MUSICAL PROJECTS:
RUMI'
Rumì is a musical show which grabs the audience with its melody and rhythm. It is the outcome of careful research on traditional Italian music and texts which unfold with spontaneity and simplicity. Luisa Cottifogli can switch among different vocal and musical styles, adopting unexpected instrumental solutions for a very expressive result.
“E Rumì d’ Santa Mareja”- as people called him – was a poor man who roamed in the streets of Romagna, an Italian region, till 1800, a beggar who sang in squares or in front of houses to receive some food or a coin.
Rumì celebrates Italian folk music with a non-traditional style where contemporary sonorities, such as jazz, pop, fusion, ethnic and electronic music meet with an elegant and sophisticated sound that evolves and changes continuously as ruled by fantasy.
This piece showcases Ms. Cottifogli’s beautiful voice and everyone will appreciate the perfect match between her new musical and vocal style and traditional Italian folk songs. In all tracks, both texts and poems come from the traditional repertoire of Romagna and Ms. Cottifogli, a native of the region, composed music and melody, using modern and electronic sounds as a passe-partout among past, present and future. Romagna’s dialect is a perfect bonding agent between text and music, mostly thanks to the singer’s ability to adapt accents, nouns and pronunciation to the melodies she crafted. Thanks to her great communicative ability, she succeeds in producing a new sound and possibly a new language. In this landscape the wonderful voice of Luisa, wide, warm and multicolored becomes an invisible bridge between distant places.
ANITA DEI DUE MONDI
Luisa Cottifogli becomes Anita, her memory and her vitality. Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, Anita Garibaldi, was both many women and many men: a girl raised as a boy in Laguna, Brazil, wild and in love with her father; a bride at fourteen, an unforgivable violence. After she met José Garibaldi, she discovered love, passion
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