Jazz Is Dead!

For its ninth edition, Jazz Is Dead! has decided to revamp its format, focusing even more on the experience of enjoying live music by placing it in a pleasant setting, close to the city yet surrounded by greenery, and moving away from the industrial venues of Turin such as OGR, Lingotto and Bunker – the latter having hosted JID in recent years. The festival relocated to Cascina Falchera and El Barrio – to the north of the city, easily reached both by motorway and public transport – amid woods and meadows that housed the two stages, one more intimate and enclosed, the other open and visible from every corner of the field. Over three days of morning, afternoon and evening programming, which included not only concerts but also talks, festival-goers could eat, drink, lie down, chat, dance and camp, creating the best possible conditions for an enjoyable, extended listening experience. Once again, JID sought to go beyond the concept of a mere event or music festival. It became a place of encounter and exchange, offering a warm, familial atmosphere punctuated by a wide-ranging, high-quality lineup spanning from Gamelan to metal, by way of the festival's usual staples: electronic music, jazz, psychedelia, noise and avant-garde.
JID thus established itself as a genuine cultural and political project, restoring music to its role as a shared social experience, a space for communal gathering and bodily awakening through listening, and offering a concrete response to the dynamics of Italy's current live music ecosystem, increasingly expensive, exclusive and exclusionary: a daily ticket cost just 15 euros – reduced to 10 for those who couldn't afford the full price, with no questions asked – while a three-day pass was set at 40 euros. To carry forward this ambitious, far-reaching agenda, JID – a festival produced by Arci Torino and Magazzino sul Po, with artistic direction and communications by TUM Torino – partnered with the likes of Torino Jazz Festival, Green Days and Almare, and received support from institutions including the Ministry of Culture, the Piedmont Region, the City of Turin, Fondazione per la Cultura Torino, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and Fondazione CRT.

The festival's programme was rich and varied, capable of alternating research-driven music from various genres with dj-sets and solo performances. Within this lineup, a few sets stood out to me in particular, starting with the flow of Friday's sonic journey, the day devoted mostly to electronic music and its experiments. In the late afternoon, near the edge of the small wood, Marta Salogni and Stefano Pilia performed, weaving a sonic dialogue between machines, Pilia's effects-laden guitar and Salogni's tape transformations expanded through field recordings. It was an ecstatic live set, in which the erudite reflections the Genoese guitarist began on "Spiralis Aurea" (Die Schachtel, 2022) engaged in a moving dialogue with the electronic tradition of tape music carried forward by the Brescia-based producer. Dusk brought us to the bigger stage, where four further, distinct approaches to electronic composition unfolded in succession, starting with the enchanting electro-tropical songwriting of Lucrecia Dalt, moving between synthetic experimentation, bolero and merengue, sci-fi unease and folkloric seduction, as developed on "¡Ay!" (Rvng, 2022) and "A Danger To Ourselves" (Rvng, 2025). Next came the sets from Matmos, avant-garde music veterans and longtime collaborators of Björk, and Alessandro Cortini, a key figure of the electronic scene who has also played alongside Nine Inch Nails: the American duo captured and delighted the crowd with a concrete electronic sound built from objects, inventions and sonic explorations that remain remarkably prolific, drawing on the excellent "Metallic Life Review" (Thrill Jockey, 2025), all wrapped in an iconic aura à-la Gilbert & George; while the Italian multi-instrumentalist immersed the audience in a minimal electronic set of powerful emotional and sensory impact, where passages of ambient music were felt on the skin as though they were techno basslines, thanks to his choice of frequencies and sound intensity.

BIG|BRAVE instead offered an abstract, expansive musical experience, previewing the forthcoming "An Uttering Of Antipathy" (Thrill Jockey, 2026), in which the band's new lineup – a trio of effects-laden electric guitars with no drums – radicalises their signature drone-metal, pushing it into an even more rarefied, granite-hard and experimental form. The evening's final sonic shift took place on the more intimate stage, driven by the charisma of two members of Massimo Volume, with the minimal electronic set of Italian duo Bono/Burattini, aka Francesca Bono and Vittoria Burattini – the latter the drummer of the Emilian band – who presented "Now I Am a Lake" (Maple Death, 2026), followed by a reading from Emidio Clementi, author not only of Massimo Volume's music but also of numerous short stories and novels – all while clubbers made their way over to El Barrio.

The festival's other two days followed two further sonic flows conceived ad hoc, envisioned by artistic director Alessandro Gambo as dj-sets. On a Saturday moving between psychedelia and black music, the day's three main live sets stood out, starting with English collective The Heliocentrics, whose visionary psych-jazz got the entire crowd dancing in every corner of Cascina Falchera. That lysergic energy didn't dissipate but transformed into the electronic set of poet and performer Moor Mother, leader of avant-jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements, with a sonic assault of spoken-word poetry and electro-noise that led into the grind-rap of Lord Spikeheart, aka Martin Kanja, voice and founder of Duma – one of the festival's real discoveries. The performance became a wholly physical experience, a sonic and visual assault of growled vocals and strobe lighting, exploring the most extreme sounds of industrial contaminated by punk and metal. While those harsher sounds were still settling in listeners' ears, the evening found reconciliation in the dj-sets of A Guy Called Gerald, a key figure of the acid house era, and Xabier Iriondo.

On Sunday, the senses awoke to ethno and jazz sounds that gradually shifted toward noise and rock, in a day packed with ensembles of various configurations, including Ensemble Nist Nah, Dwarfs of East Agouza, Glacial, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, Horse Lords and Sanam. At sunset, Horse Lords delivered their solid live set built on math-rock with jazz influences, opening up into sax-led passages that echoed Tortoise, within a rich, robust rhythmic-harmonic framework steeped in kraut-rock. Closing out the main stage were Sanam, a Lebanese outfit produced by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem in My Heart) and released via Constellation, who blend the tradition of Arabic and Mediterranean music with experimental rock, incorporating the buzuq alongside guitar and synth into their lineup. Their live set was thoroughly captivating, with more intense opening and closing sections and a more contemplative middle section, where a sparser dynamic gave way to Sandy Chamoun's voice.

This bucolic three-day edition of Jazz Is Dead! thus drew a crowd of 8,000, an audience that – as the organisers' statement put it – was "large, smiling, focused, engaged, well-behaved, [and] generated a special synergy that undoubtedly rubbed off on everyone." A zero-kilometre festival that, in a city where many cultural initiatives have been cut short or bent to the logic of the "event factory" – the indiscriminate reduction of every cultural practice to a mere event – positions itself as an artistic and political project rooted in its local territory while, at the same time, engaging with the international context of experimental music understood as underground culture, full stop.

photo by Fabiana Amato

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google