“At first, it was the passion, the music, the gang. These became the dance band for the countless weddings in Berchidda and the ensembles to liven up the town festivals, tea dances and Carnevale celebrations in Gallura. Up until, after visiting a small portion of the world and going to a few national and international festivals, I felt the need to create something in my little town that put to good use what I’d learned and picked up elsewhere. Time in Jazz was a new sowing season and a new harvest. […] That was how, in distant 1988, a jazz festival came about in Sardinia, specifically in Berchidda.
It grew from the will of a small group of people who thirty years ago believed that the impossible could become possible: that is, that a jazz festival could come to be in a little village in Logudoro with only three thousand souls, far from the cultural hubs of Italy and the rest of the whole wide world. A place that therefore had no relationship with music that came from overseas, if not for the fact that in Berchidda there was a historic band, and then there was me, who’d been dabbling in jazz for a dozen years or so, steeped in the American legends. […]
Time in Jazz was the title chosen. It meant nothing in Italian, and in English it was just a jumble of words, but it worked visually and sounded good. Time in Jazz, then. In fact, “Il nuovo tempo del jazz!” (“The new time of jazz!”) was its subtitle for several editions. “New” because it aimed to be different and aspired to express jazz from a new point of view: mine.
There were multiple objectives: to give continuity to the event that would be held, like every real festival, on an annual basis; to root it in the territory through projects that took into account our culture; and finally to make it an instrument to develop the local economy and tourism, drawing an audience from all over Italy and presenting Berchidda as an original, unique place where things could happen, things that couldn’t happen anywhere else.
Besides, I knew it was probably the only way to lure people inland on the island. Thirty years ago, widespread tourism here wasn’t yet popular and the only Sardinia people knew was the coastland and the even higher-end, bigger-spending, rather tacky tourism of VIPs along the Costa Smeralda.
The event had the express aim of turning the festival into a tool for experimentation and exchange, where artists could meet in order to produce something new, overturning that age-old mentality according to which the best ideas always come from outside.”
—Paolo Fresu, Time in Jazz (published by Franco Cosimo Panini Editore, 2017)
In over thirty years, Paolo Fresu has never come short of his initial intentions, and today the international Time in Jazz festival is one of Europe’s most important cultural appointments, an event which every summer draws forty thousand spectators to this corner of northern Sardinia, between Gallura and Logudoro, thanks to the quality, originality and variety of each edition’s program.
The program is brimming with events (over fifty), which for ten consecutive days, from morning till late at night, make their way through a wide variety of locations and spaces: the large open-air theater set up in the main square of Berchidda for the evening concerts, but also the woods of Mt. Limbara, the rural churches in the countryside surrounding the town and the other villages which the festival visits, locations that are particularly important because of their history or nature, or are representative of the local socio-cultural fabric.
Naturally, jazz and improvised music account for the lion’s share. Ornette Coleman, Ahmad Jamal, Uri Caine, Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas, Steven Bernstein, Jeanne Lee, Omar Sosa, Jan Garbarek, Nils Petter Molvaer, Arve Henriksen, John Surman, Richard Galliano, Michel Portal, Nguyen Le, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Ernst Reijseger, Pierre Favre, Iva Bittova, Kronos Quartet, Jon Hassell, Mario Brunello, Alexander Balanescu, Dhafer Youssef, Rabih Abou Khalil, Gianluigi Trovesi, Enrico Rava, Franco D’Andrea, Giorgio Gaslini, Enrico Pieranunzi, Maria Pia De Vito, Antonello Salis, Rita Marcotulli, Stefano Bollani and Gianluca Petrella are just some of the many performers who’ve been applauded over the years at Time in Jazz.
Then there’s Balkan fanfare such as Kocani Orkestar and Taraf de Haïdouks, groups coming in from Africa, the Caribbean or Vietnam, tenor choirs and extemporaneous Sardinian poets, theatrical artists like Paolo Rossi, Lella Costa, Ascanio Celestini and Marco Baliani, singers and singer-songwriters like Ornella Vanoni, Gianmaria Testa, Cristiano De André, Morgan, Teresa De Sio, Alice, Ivan Segreto and Mirko Casadei, showing that Time in Jazz harmonizes all genres and styles.
But Time in Jazz isn’t all music. That’s why, since 2019, the name of the event is also found in connection not only to music but also to the words art, literature, cinema, environment and community to express the complexity and thoroughness of one of the year’s most highly anticipated artistic and cultural projects.
Each edition revolves around a different theme, a leitmotif that runs through and characterizes the program itself. Each time, Time in Jazz journeys through the latest trends in jazz and authorial executions, delves into the realms of ethnic and digital sounds, experiments with the relationship and consonance between music and words, music and poetry, music and images, music and play, music and cooking, music and architecture, music and earth, water, air and fire…
It’s therefore a festival devoted to originality and creativity, mindful of contemporary languages yet with deep roots in the territory, with all its traditions, people, places, nature and culture, even materially. During the days of Time in Jazz, a mix of creativity and humanity fills not only Berchidda and the festival’s other venues but also, and most importantly, people’s hearts and minds: the musicians, artists and crowds of spectators coming from every imaginable place find themselves sharing the emotion of an inimitable experience, immersed in an utterly unique atmosphere filled with music and art, but also colors, aromas and flavors. This is the key to the success of Time in Jazz, an event of great cultural depth on an international scale that also keeps alive the joy of celebration.