Composer, percussionist and multimedia artist Andrea Centazzo has been for 54 years a bold explorer of contemporary art. In the early 70’s he introduced a new concept of percussion playing, migrating from the Free Jazz to a new form of improvised music, defining itself and in the same time searching a path to his own new compositional methods.
In the late 70’s, Centazzo was one of the founders of the NY Downtown Music Scene with his seminal collaboration with John Zorn, Tom Corra, Eugene Chadbourne, Toshinori Kondo and others, documented in many albums.
In 1976 he established ICTUS Records, one of the first musician operated labels, recording with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Pierre Favre, Derek Bailey, John Zorn, Alvin Curran, Albert Mangelsdorff, Don Cherry, Marylin Crispell, Elliott Sharp and many others.
He left the improvised music scene in 1986, starting a video making career and moving shortly after to Los Angeles, CA, dedicating himself to composition and film direction. Centazzo authored 3 operas, 2 symphonies and almost 500 compositions for all kind of ensembles, plus many award winning video films.
Back to live performing in 1998, he created solo concerts and solo multimedia concerts, playing live in synch with videos that he shoots and edits.
One of his latest project Tides of gravity has been presented in collaboration with the Nobel Prize for Physic Kip Thorne and produced by LIGO, Caltech and NASA.
Now he’s on tour with Animae Mundi, a new exciting multimedia concert created to draw attention to the climate crisis that the planet is experiencing.
The Library of the University of Bologna at DAMS, just recently dedicated to the composer the Fondo Andrea Centazzo where all his works are collected and made available to students and scholars.
Andrea Centazzo was awarded on November 17th 2023 in the Town Hall in Udine, Italy, with the presentation of the Seal of the City. The mayor of the city Alberto Felice De Toni, accompanied by the Councilor for Culture and the Councilor for Tourism paid homage to the artist, active throughout the world and in particular in the United States but born in Udine in 1948.
The ‘Seal of the City‘ was awarded for the important research work carried out in the musical and artistic fields and for having contributed to spreading Italian and Friulian culture and the name of the City abroad.