Bio

How I became a musician

I was born in the industrialized Northern Italy of the 70s, to a Lombard mother and a Sicilian father. In my lonely childhood I had among my most faithful friends a record by Louis Armstrong, one by the Beatles and one by Béla Bartók, which were constantly playing. The upright piano, on which I spent hours studying, didn't give me the emotion of listening like those records could.
As a teenager I discovered heavy rock and started playing the electric bass, letting myself be carried away by the opportunity to meet the musicians of my city. In the kaleidoscope of genres that I have frequented, the blues brought me closer to the folkloric radicality of musical expression, which I have never stopped searching for.
Jazz allowed me to combine the theater of the blues story with the complexity of the classical, satisfying my passion for harmonic articulation and constituting the main surrounding of my compositional activity.
In 2014 I moved to Berlin, seduced by the diversity of horizons that the city offers, attracted by the opportunity to get to know a touch of Eastern Europe and Middle Eastern influences that bring me closer to my southern roots. Far from my hometown, I find in Berlin a knot of roots among which there are also mine. I don't intend to untie that knot, but rather observe its continuous intertwining.

How I became an actor

In 1994 I moved to Bologna to study engineering. After two years of fruitful study, I still couldn't get closer to the productive world of telecommunications, which I was destined for. I then enrolled in a professional school for prose actors, then financed by the EEC, where I graduated in 1998. We acted for the Arena del Sole, in Bologna, for the Teatro Due, in Parma. I then became part of a commedia dell'arte company, with which we toured Northern Italy, performing public readings. After reading fairy tales to my daughters in the evening for a few years, I proposed myself to the Italian Union of the Blind as an audiobook reader and I worked there until 2014 when I moved to Berlin. Here I worked on several productions as an actor and musician and in 2023 I performed in Brescia a theater piece that I wrote to commemorate the massacre of Piazza della Loggia in 1974.

Musical career

Carmelo Leotta was born in 1975, and he's a professional musician since 1999. Versatile bass player, he started out playing electric bass in blues bands all around Italy, in the biggest Blues festivals of the country joining major blues performers, such as Alex Schultz, Bruce Katz, James Thompson, Roy Roberts, Finis Tasby, Rob Sudduth, Eric Andersen, Harriet Lewis, Herbie Goins,, Vince Vallicelli, Pippo Guarnera, Nik Becattini, Enrico Crivellaro, Roberto Morbioli. He was hired as a side man by famous italian singers as Massimo Bubola, Eugenio Finardi and Bobby Solo, with whom he had high visibility in the country.

In the meantime he studied bass intensively, which led him to take part in the international jazz scene. In 2005 he met Bobby Durham and he joined the trio with him and Massimo Faraò until Durham sadly passed away, in 2008. Then he stayed on the national and international jazz scene, working with Tiziana Ghiglioni, Pietro Tonolo, Flavio Boltro, Fabrizio Bosso, Sandro Gibellini, Marcello Tonolo, Irio de Paula, Antonio Zambrini, Mauro Beggio, Fausto Beccalossi, Bruno Marini, Helga Plankensteiner, Davide Ghidoni, Emanuele Maniscalco, Carmelo Tartamella, Simone Guiducci, Cristina Mazza, Alfred Kramer, Kyle Gregory, Jimmy Villotti, Gianni Cazzola, Carlo Atti, Piero Odorici, Antonio Ciacca, Davide Ghidoni, Roberto Soggetti, Daniele D'Agaro, Mauro Ottolini, Paolo Mappa, Titti Castrini, and frequently touring with major american jazz musicians, such as Archie Shepp, Benny Golson, Jimmy Cobb, Mickey Roker, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Mickey Roker, Paul Jeffrey, Joey DeFrancesco, Michele Hendricks, Hal Singer, Jesse Davis, Eliot Zigmund, Philip Harper, Jerry Weldon, Andy Gravish, Jamie Davis, Carol Sudhalter, Garrison Fewell, Kyle Poole, Myrna Clayton.

In the while he wrote and recorder many original compositions for small bands as far as for septet and big band.

Carmelo Leotta has been living in Berlin since 2014, where he has been involved in numerous musical projects. He joint various musical spheres, crossing over the jazz trough the blues, the free and the hip hop scenes,. He plays with Eric Vaughn, Kelvin Sholar, Larry Porter, Walter Gauchel, Helmut Bruger, Lito Tabora, Zam Johnson, Christoph Adams, Joe Kucera, Johannes Barthelmes, Andrea Marcelli, Davide Incorvaia, Roberto Manzin, Tino Derado, Martin Bauer, David Haynes, Craig Burton, Vernon Hill, Jan Hirte, Donna Brown, Ben Perkoff, Stefano Ronchi, Marko Jovanovich and many others.

He's occasionally involved in theater productions, he worked for Eva & Rainer Leupold GbR (Mannheim), for Konzertdirektion Landgraf (Titisee Neuestadt), for Theater Zentrifuge (Berlin) and for the Theater am Frankfurther Tor (Berlin). He is currently a member of the Torsten Zwingenberger Quartet, with Patrik Braun and Kenneth Berkel, the Ania Paz Trio, with Christoph Hillman, the Joel Holmes' “Expansion”, with Omri Abramov und Hans Otto, Desney Bailey's “Three for soul” with Carly Quiros, Jan Trojanowskj and Jean Ghazal, and the Composer Orchestra Berlin. He also initiated several autonomous projects, such as “Windkammermusik", with Dima Bondarev and Olga Amenchelko, "Little Monster", with Zam Johnson, "Hybris dudes", with Omri Abramov, Tal Yadin and Kenny Martin. He composes contemporary music for the editions "Helvetia Pizzicato", which has published his last work “Narcissus”. His compositions are edited by Random Musick Editions and by Blackbird Music.

As for his teaching activity, he assisted Buster Williams and other American bassists in international workshops. He has always taught regularly double bass, electric bass and music theory in music schools and privately.

He worked as arranger, 2006 for Alberti Theatre, in Desenzano (BS, Italy), in 2007 for the municipal theatre of Casal Pusterlengo (PC, Italy) and for the big band “VR Improvisers”, in Verona (Italy), and in 2008 for Unity Music LLC (California, U.S.), in 2010 for the songwriter Ruben (Pierfrancesco Coppolella), in 2018 for Lia Andes, in 2020 for Lucia Fodde, in 2021 for Maria Dangell.

CARMELO

LEOTTA

Bio

Musical career

With the Vince Vallicelli Band, 1999

With Benny Golson, 2011

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