Carmine Ioanna

Carmine Ioanna was born in Avellino on October 20th 1985. He began playing at 4-years-old. Soon, from the age of 8 on, he started playing in public both as a pianist and as an accordion player and, at the age of 11, he enrolled in the conservatory Cimarosa in Avellino for the piano class. At 17 he moved to Frosinone where a new chair of accordion was opened at the conservatory L. Refice and he then graduated with the guide A. Ranieri. While studying the classics, he also always played improvised music such as jazz. He collaborated with the conservatory in Frosinone on many occasions. Among the most important awards he received the scholarship of the “Berkley College of Music”, the seminars of Umbria Jazz and then he won the European contest of jazz accordion with a score of 100/100. In 2012 he worked on the albums “Il Pentagramma della Memoria”, a musical project that rearranged in jazz style the music that had been written on the Nazi concentration camps. Along with Luca Aquino, the albums see Sergio Casale at the sax and the flute. Additionally, the album “Per quanto vi prego” sees the collaboration with the “La Costituente” group in 2011. In 2013 he played on the album “aQustico” (Tuk Music) by Luca Aquino, released in July in Italy and in November in France. In 2014 he published the new album “SOLO” for Bonsai Music, in collaboration with Luca Aquino at the trumpet and Francesco Bearzatti at the clarinet; meanwhile, he started a collaboration with Seoul rapper Loptimist in an experimental project that sees the accordion mixed with hip hop and which is released in Asia for the Kemistreet. In the same year, he recorded the album “Zingarìa” with the Lokomarket in Holland, edited by the O.A.P. Record, and he participated in the “Opera da tre soldi” by Brecht in 15 reruns at the Sidecar, for which Ioanna created a solo arrangement for accordion. Among the projects of 2015 there are “Petra”, recorded in the archaeological site of the same name in Jordan and sponsored by Unesco and “Anime Migranti”, a theatrical show with actress Claudia D’Amico about the topic of emigration. In 2016 there were the project “d’ZIC Trio” with Eric Capone and Vim Zambsnrè (the encounter with the French pianist and the percussionist from Burkina Faso will end in an album at the end of this year) and the album “Irpinia”, recorded in Grenoble with the saxophonist Luca Roseto. Carmine Ioanna also directs the “Accordion Day”, a festival now at its third edition, which takes place in Irpinia and which has seen, among other guests, also Antonello Salis, Luca Aquino, Marco Colonna and Adriano Ranieri. This is an event that sets forth the link between Ioanna and his homeland, so much that it gave birth to the “Hirpus Accordion Orchestra”, a project with 50 accordion players all from the same area. To this day, Carmine Ioanna has performed in more than 30 countries in the world: USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, England, Switzerland, France, Jordan, Israel, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Tunisia, Libya, Finland, Latvia, Norway, Austria, Kazakistan, Kergistan, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, Holland, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Kosovo and, naturally, Italy, where she exhibited at important festivals (Atina Jazz, Time in Jazz, Roccella Jonica, European Jazz Expo in Cagliari, Ravenna Jazz, Eco Jazz, La Luna e i Calanchi, etc.).