Rita Marcotulli was born in Rome in 1959. She studied the piano from a very early age at the Santa Cecilia Academy. At first attracted to Brazilian music she turned towards Jazz at twenty… with great success. Her career got of to a flying start. Right from the start of the 1980s she had the chance to play with the cream of European jazz: Chet Baker, John Christensen, Palle Danielsson, Peter Erskine, Steve Grossman, Joe Henderson, Hélène La Barrière, Joe Lovano, Charlie Mariano, Tony Oxley, Michel Portal, Enrico Rava, Michel Bénita, Aldo Romano, Kenny Wheeler... Her intimate playing, of a great deepness, and her subtle arrangements that emphasise a note and amplify its emotional charge, allowed her to make many encounters, particularly with other arts, such as cinema, which she has done a lot of composing for: “My music was obviously influenced by the work of a number of great artists: Thelonius Monk, Elis Regina, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, just to cite a few. But above the world of sound, it has been influenced by so many other experiences, artistic, literary, visual and naturally cinematographic. In particular, I’ve always felt a great affinity between the poetic world that I try to express and that of one of the sharpest film-directors of all time, François Truffaut. Nostalgia for childhood, a vocation for flight, a respect for timidity, the ambiguity of love, the sense of life going by, the struggle between innocence and experience are all notions that can be found throughout Truffaut’s work and these same feelings are often to be found behind the notes of my compositions and arrangements”. Never had Truffaut’s cinema had such a great tribute as The Woman Next Door, recorded in 1997.
The Italian pianist is also very attracted by dance. Her manner of occupying space, of drawing volumes of sound like authentic characters seduced choreographers such as Roberta Garrisson and Teri J. Weikel.
With Rita Marcotulli, Jazz reveals its capacity to attach itself to bodies and to invest places, so as to create an atmosphere that carries the audience off into a world of feeling.
