Giuseppe Cistola
Biography Giuseppe Cistola
Giuseppe Cistola
He began cultivating a passion for music at a very young age, playing with the guitars he had at home. His studies were essentially self-taught and his first sources of inspiration were Wes Montgomery (from whom he inherited the exclusive use of the thumb instead of the plectrum) and Bill Evans. His encounter with the records of these two giants got him hooked on jazz, thus skipping the rock parenthesis, which is generally the gymnasium of young musicians. His strong predisposition towards music led him to make rapid progress on the instrument and led him to win a scholarship to the Arcevia Jazz seminars in 2010. In 2014, he won second place in the Bottega Jazz Contest and a prize of 10 hours of recording time, which he will use for his first demo. In 2016 he enrolled in the three-year jazz guitar course at the Pergolesi Conservatory in Fermo. In 2017, during his stay in Argentina, he met some local musicians who organised a series of concerts for him. He thus came into contact with Argentinian music and drew inspiration from it for his compositions.
In 2019, he distinguished himself in the courses organised in Perugia by the prestigious American Berklee College of Music, for "Umbria Jazz", which led him to perform on the festival's main stage for the students' concert. He won the Berklee courses' scholarship and was selected as the best guitarist of the courses, so together with the best students of the other instruments he played at Umbria Jazz Winter 2019 (Orvieto's winter version of Umbria Jazz). With Lorenzo Scipioni on double bass and Michele Sperandio on drums they form the B - Side Trio, which for the recording of the album "Por la calle argentina" becomes the Giuseppe Cistola Quintet with the addition of Marco Postacchini on tenor and soprano sax and Simone Maggio on piano.
In 2020, the Giuseppe Cistola Quintet released 'Por La Calle Argentina' on the Emme Record Label. The album contains ten tracks entirely composed and arranged by the young guitarist. It was a very busy year for Giuseppe, who did not stop there, a finalist at the 'Massimo Urbani Prize', a prestigious competition in Italy. In the same summer, he participated several times in the prestigious Fara Music Festival, organised by Enrico Moccia. In September, he decided to give his second project a chance, in which he maintained the quintet and added the voice of Marta Giulioni. He took part in the 'All you have to do is play' competition organised by the Emme Record Label and presented his new project 'The Five Elements' (8 compositions all composed and arranged by Giuseppe).
On 6 March 2023, 100 years after Wes Montgomery's birth, his third album, 'Remember Wes', a tribute to the guitarist from Indianapolis, USA, one of the main jazz figures in the history of the 20th century, will be released.
