Umbria Jazz 2026

Sting 3.0 – World Tour (July 3)

In recent years, illustrious names have taken the Umbria Jazz stage, but no one in the festival's more or less recent history has meant to the Perugia event what Sting means to it. The 1987 concert at the Stadio Renato Curi, alongside Gil Evans, belongs to that rare category of events that don't just enrich a history but end up redirecting its course. From that day on, Umbria Jazz began, more fully, to become the festival we know today. After that show in front of twenty-five thousand people, Sting would return to Perugia only once more, in 2012, in a rock guise, complete with percussion, horns and keyboards. Yet this new stop at the Arena Santa Giuliana is different from all the others. This time he's joined by two other musicians: Dominic Miller, his longtime guitarist and collaborator, and Chris Maas, a drummer who has also played with Maggie Rogers and Mumford & Sons.

The show's opening, with "Message In A Bottle", is a statement of intent: the thirteen thousand fans at the Arena Santa Giuliana - an absolute record for a single night at the Perugia venue - get a setlist packed with hits, but reworked through the lean, sharp-edged bones of the power trio. "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic", "Can't Stand Losing You", "So Lonely", "Wrapped Around Your Finger" and "Every Breath You Take" pay tribute to the more distant past, the years spent alongside Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, when the Police managed to hold together the jitteriness of punk and the pulse of reggae, without giving up the sticky pop hooks that made rock history straddling the Seventies and the Eighties.
The setlist also makes room for his solo hits: "Englishman In New York", greeted by a roar from the crowd, "Shape Of My Heart", "Desert Rose" and "Fields Of Gold", with a sea of phones lighting up the audience.
But it's "Never Coming Home" that steals the show. Miller works the six strings with almost surgical precision, between tapping, arpeggios and an intense closing solo, a reminder, if one were needed, of the caliber of the musicians who lend this "3.0" project its shine. Whatever Sting can no longer summon from his technical arsenal, he makes up for with his voice, still iconic and present despite being well past seventy.

In the end, the meaning of this return lies partly in its restraint. There's no monumental orchestra like in 1987, no lineup as rich as in 2012, not even the temptation to turn every song into a self-indulgent celebration. Instead, there's a geometric concert, more delicate than overwhelming, built by subtraction, as if Sting had chosen to strip weight from the songs to test, once again, how well they hold up. And many of them, predictably, hold up beautifully. "Roxanne" arrives in the encore in a peculiar, almost restrained form, before the English musician sets down the electric bass and picks up the acoustic guitar for "Fragile", a whispered, fitting epilogue that closes the story of this concert and adds one more chapter to Umbria Jazz's decades-long history.

Perigeo – The Last Concert & BEAT performing the Music of 80s King Crimson (4 luglio)

The second day of Umbria Jazz is all about celebration. The crowd from the night before is a far cry from the one gathering at the entrance of the Teatro Morlacchi, amid the ancient stones of the city centre, to catch the live show by Paolo Fresu dedicated to Miles Davis in the year of his centenary.
Different again is the crowd that fills the space in front of the Arena Santa Giuliana stage for the evening concert. Long hair, T-shirts bearing the logos of Metallica's or Iron Maiden's European tours: it takes only a glance to understand that this is the night of BEAT, the supergroup formed by two ex-King Crimson members, Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, with Steve Vai on guitar – his second appearance at Umbria Jazz in two years – and Danny Carey of Tool on drums. First, though, it's the turn of Perigeo, the storied Italian jazz-rock outfit, back on stage after years away for a concert bearing a title that leaves little room for interpretation: "The Last Concert".

For them, the undertaking is anything but a minor one. Perigeo belong to an era in which electric jazz, fusion and progressive were not merely catalogue labels, but concrete opportunities to broaden both audience and musical language. In the Seventies, while Miles Davis was blazing a trail and Weather Report were following it in their own personal way, the Italian band had the merit of bringing that new idea of jazz closer to a younger, more curious slice of listeners, less interested in genre boundaries than in the sheer power of the music. It's no small detail, then, that Perigeo also played at the very first edition of Umbria Jazz, in Piazza IV Novembre, back when the festival wasn't yet the complex machine it is today, but already a wonderfully inspired (and at the same time problematic) idea of Carlo Pagnotta's.

They're all on stage, more than half a century after their first time: Giovanni Tommaso, Claudio Fasoli and Bruno Biriaco. Franco D'Andrea is missing, true, but he too will make his entrance in the final stretch of the show. Joining the lineup are Claudio Filippini on keyboards, Alessandro Paternesi on second drums and Giovanni Imparato on percussion. A few shaky moments aside, the performance is convincing. The sense is that the attentive, select crowd at the Arena is happily won over by a sound that carries nostalgia and pleasure in equal measure, without ever turning into a museum piece. Almost an hour and a half of live music conjures up the glories of an era in which the band, swinging between different genres like a tightrope walker suspended in mid-air, managed to earn credibility on an international scale.
After classic pieces such as "La valle dei templi", "Abbiamo tutti un blues da piangere", "Genealogia" and "Torre del Lago" - written with Giacomo Puccini, Giovanni Tommaso's fellow townsman, in mind - D'Andrea comes on stage for the final four tracks. In this "last" Perigeo concert, the applause rewards not only what's happening in the moment, but everything the sound carries with it: the years, the roads travelled, the absences, and the courage to get back on a stage after all this time.

The moment for BEAT arrives after about half an hour's technical break; a whistle introduces "Neurotica", the first track of a set that will run for nearly an hour and a half. "Too short", some fans will complain, having chosen Perugia over the dates in Pompeii, Gardone Riviera or Bari, where the band staged a considerably longer show. Such are the dynamics of a festival where BEAT weren't the only act on the bill that night.

The band revisits three iconic King Crimson albums released in the Eighties: "Discipline", "Beat" and "Three Of A Perfect Pair". A monumental task, as Belew himself has called it, not only because that music is as fierce as it is complex, but because it belongs to a territory where virtuosity, when orphaned of vision, can instantly become a mere exercise in style. But BEAT do have a vision. They play music that's difficult, at times almost cacophonous, moving between nervy geometries, space-rock atmospheres and compact monoliths of sound, unmoored from space or time, yet they never lose themselves in it.
Setting aside Steve Vai's solos, which alone would be worth the ticket price for six-string devotees, pieces like "Matte Kudasai" or "Frame By Frame" trace a brighter, more reassuring path, helped along by Belew's voice, still in great shape at seventy-six. Tony Levin, still and magnetic, holds the rhythmic framework together with his usual authority, while Danny Carey drives the machine forward with a force that never overshadows precision.

The closing "Indiscipline" is the final chapter of an evening built on the unstable balance between memory and risk. On one side, Perigeo, with the palpable emotion of a band perhaps bidding farewell to the audience for the last time; on the other, BEAT, tasked with bringing back to life music that was never meant to be comfortable, and which, perhaps for that very reason, refuses to age.
It wasn't an easy evening, and maybe it wasn't meant to be. But Umbria Jazz, in its best incarnations, is also this: not just a place where jazz is preserved, but one where it can still disguise itself, cross-contaminate, lose its centre and find it again somewhere else. Sometimes in the shape of an old Italian band coming back to make music; other times as four superhuman performers who, since the Eighties, are still transmitting the sound of the future.

Zucchero (11 July)

There's a giant sun in the middle of the Arena Santa Giuliana stage. When Zucchero walks on, it's almost as if seven thousand people had waited for darkness just to watch him light up. On stage: two drum kits, percussion, guitars, keyboards, horns, backing vocals and a golden piano reflecting the last light of sunset. All the ingredients for a rousing show are there, and Zucchero doesn't disappoint, with a live set that will ultimately run nearly three hours. The opening track, "Spirito nel buio", is introduced by a quote from Pessoa, according to whom the poet is nothing but "a feigner". Thinking about it, everything suddenly makes sense. Zucchero, after all, has always been feigning: feigning America while staying Italian, feigning the blues without betraying melody, feigning the loutish tavern-dweller while running a live show machine that has little to envy in certain international productions. Then come "Il mare impetuoso al tramonto salì sulla luna e dietro una tendina di stelle…", "Menta e rosmarino", "Solo una sana e consapevole libidine salva il giovane dallo stress e dall'Azione Cattolica". Titles as long as nursery rhymes, but ones that introduce songs the audience has carried with them for years, some for a whole lifetime. On stage Zucchero wears his usual hat, moving with that gait somewhere between sly and small-town preacher, but his voice - cavernous, and rasping when it needs to be - is still able to hold together Roncocesi and the Mississippi, Italian song and Joe Cocker, Sunday morning gospel and late-night bar rock.

The band is monstrous, but in the most literal sense of the word: twelve musicians playing as a single creature, each one its own limb. Polo Jones holds things together on bass and musical direction, Kat Dyson – formerly of New Power Generation with Prince – gives the guitar and backing vocals a brilliant funk sheen, Peter Vettese and Nicola Peruch build the harmonic ground beneath it all, Mario Schilirò adds craft and loyalty, Adriano Molinari drives things forward on drums without ever stepping in front of the song. The backing singers, as always at Zucchero's shows, are never mere window dressing: Oma Jali, in particular, earns a huge round of applause with a voice that seems to arrive from another emotional latitude entirely.

At one point Zucchero sits down, picks up a guitar and slows the pace, trying to deepen the connection with the crowd. It's the most intimate part of the show, almost unplugged, where a huge concert tries to make itself small without ever feeling weak. Along come "Un soffio caldo", a tribute to Guccini, "Come il sole all'improvviso", in memory of Gino Paoli, and a scaled-down "Donne". Then, amid gospel, soul, R&B and rock, Zucchero also celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of "Baila", released in 2001 as part of "Shake" and still fitting the audience today like a linen shirt in summer.
On "Vedo nero" the Arena finally stops sitting still and Santa Giuliana turns into a party. "Miserere", with its virtual duet alongside Luciano Pavarotti, opens up a more solemn, almost inevitable rift, while "Dune mosse" carries with it the shadow of Miles Davis and his legendary solo, as if certain ghosts could still pass through Perugia without needing to be announced.
Then the band takes over the stage, with "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Honky Tonk Train Blues", while Zucchero rests in the wings. When he returns, he doesn't just watch - he raises the stakes. The finale is huge: "Dune mosse", "Il volo", "Diamante", "X colpa di chi?" and "Diavolo in me". A sequence that would be enough to send everyone home happy, if only anyone actually wanted to go home. The crowd asks for more and Zucchero delivers, first with "Chocabeck" and "That Old Sweet Roll", then with "Hey Man", dug up from 1987's "Blue's".

Zucchero's debut at Umbria Jazz comes late, after countless other artists and after years of waiting, but perhaps it arrives at just the right moment: when there's nothing left to prove, and all that's left to do is play songs that, as expected, still bear the weight of time magnificently.

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