Parco della Musica Records “Bix Factor,” the new recording project of Mauro Ottolini and his ensemble Sousaphonix. The concept album is dedicated to the jazz music of the 1920s and 1930s: a double CD with twenty tracks that serve as the soundtrack to a fantastic tale featuring characters from that era who come alive in musicians of today.

Storytelling words and music come together in this unique jazz project. A film in music and words or invisible film that makes the listener experience a true journey through time, immersing him or her in this adventure that begins with a terrible epidemic that threatens the world today. Only a handful of musicians will be able to save him. The disc features pieces from the jazz repertoire between the 1920s and the mid-1930s, with music from the New Orleans and Chicago tradition that until now no one in Italy had recorded. Completing the project are some original pieces and the second movement of Igor Stravinsky‘s Ebony Concert.

Ottolini and his musicians follow a personal compass, pointing toward New Orleans jazz, not in a revivalist sense but in the recovery of polyphony and the freedom of use of sound materials, allowing its roots to be laid bare. Mauro Ottolini is a multi-instrumentalist and his music is polystylistic. His use of the muted trombone, the saucy slide trumpet, and the full-bodied yet agile sousaphone inspires him to generate pieces that express a complex personality, the result of a personal history that encompasses classical and operatic, popular, jazz, and African-American music. The trombonist and composer produces music that crosses stylistic, geographical and temporal boundaries.