he Italian Cultural Institute is pleased to announce the eighth concert of the Vivacissimo! concert series. Italian jazz musicians Andrea Pellegrini (piano) and Mirko Guerrini (sax) will present The Macchiaioli Project, based on a concept by Pellegrini. The music is inspired by the artworks of the Tuscan Macchiaioli, a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany between the 19th and 20th centuries. Their ability resided in representing their impressions of the object using strongs contrasts of light and dark obtained not only through their drawing technique and the chiaroscuro, but also by combining contrasting colour tones.

Andrea Pellegrini, born in Genoa in 1963, is a pianist, composer, arranger, conductor, and jazz teacher. He has been defined as “versatile and eclectic“ by the famous magazine Musica Jazz. His sound, defined as “rich of impressionistic, ethnic and romantic suggestions combined with improvised parts of European origin“ by the Gazzetta di Parma in 1998, is the result of his very precocious music education, started when he was only 5 years old. He obtained a Bachelor diploma in Jazz (cum laude and publication) at the Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali P.Mascagni in Livorno and, in 1989, he started his professional career as a professional jazz musician.

Apart from having taught Jazz and having held several seminars in various music schools and universities all around Italy and abroad, Andrea Pellegrini established and conducted for 10 years the Bonamici Atypical Jazz Orchestra Group-One, formed by Jazz students and teachers of the Bonamici Music School in Pisa. From 2004 until 2010, he worked as Director of the same school. He was the first Italian jazz musician to be leading a music school which includes departments of Classical Music, Baroque Music, Early Music, Music Therapy and so on.

During his career, he worked with many music journals and magazines, such as Continuum, Jazzit and Audiophile Sound, with the contemporary culture’s website alleo.it and the publisher Erasmo, publishing many articles, reviews, interviews and two books. Now he is the Italian delegate in EMU, the European Music School Union (International Music Council Unesco).

Mirko Guerrini, born in Florence in 1973, is a jazz saxophonist, composer and arranger. He started his music studies and in 1992 he obtained a degree in Classical Sax at the Conservatorio L. Cherubini in Florence. In 1991 he had already started specializing in Jazz with highly respected teachers, such as Mauro Grossi, Maurizio Giammarco e Dave Liebman. Later on, he completed his Master’s degree in Jazz, cum laude, at the same conservatory. Guerrini has collaborated and played with international artists such as Stefano Bollani, Caetano Veloso, Dave Liebman, Peter Erskine, Billy Cobham and many more, performing at some of the most important international festivals such as, among many others, those in Rio de Janeiro, San Paolo, Melbourne, New York, and Toronto.

Just like Pellegrini, Guerrini regularly holds seminars in international centres in Italy and abroad, for example at the Banff Centre for Performing Arts, Canada and the Monash University di Melbourne, Australia. He has worked as a conductor with the Tuscany Regional Orchestra, the Solisti from Perugia, the Camera della Campania Orchestra, the A. Toscanini Orchestra, the Monash University Symphonic Orchestra and the Magna Grecia Orchestra, and is currently working as art director at the Teatro Ridotto Politeama in Prato. He is also teaching at the Istituto Musicale Pietro Mascagni in Livorno. He has recently been appointed Adjunct Fellow and Teaching Associate at the Sir Zelman Cowen Music School, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

The event has been made possible thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella in Florence.