For more than 20 years Rocco Zifarelli has worked alongside the famous movie music composer Ennio Morricone, with whom he has recorded many award-winning scores (Academy Award, Golden Globe, Bafta, etc) and performed in many tours around the world.

Published 20 years after the acclaimed Lyndon (Via VenetoJazz-Universal) this brand new album Music Unites continues on the same musical concept, that concerns instrumental electric jazz and jazz-rock in general, with 10 tracks describing a series of experiences of musical life in Rome, New York and especially in Paris.

1. 'Northern Line' (7:47)
2. 'Aural' (6:02)
3. 'Le Clan Des Siciliens' (6;11)
4. 'The Untouchables' (4:59)
5. 'Ballad For Mr. Kromback' (4:11)
6. 'Essential Blues' (8:04)
7. 'With The Help Of God, Shine' (6:38)
8. 'Abidjan' (4:32)
9. 'Aural - reprise' (3:27)
10. 'The Untouchables - alt. take' (4:53)

For this quite magnificent musical experience, Music Unites prompted Rocco to bring together a number of great musicians with whom he had collaborated with in the past.

These included: Paco Sery (Ivory Coast) on drums, Linley Marthe (Mauritius Island) on bass; the rhythm section of Joe Zawinul Syndicate; Italian electric and acoustic bass stars Dario Deidda and Pippo Matino; Russian trumpeter Alex Sipiagin; and two DJ’s and sound designers Freddy Jay (Paris) and Yassin Africancuts (Brussels), amongst others.

Featuring a lot of musical variety, original and non-original compositions, including two revisited Morricone’s themes, Music Unites is most definitely an album that brings together people, cultures and sounds to formulate an expansive, and worldly backbeat to guide us all, in these darks times, through and out the other side.

Opening with the soaring, cultural magnificence of 'Northern Line', he backs that up seamlessly with the uber-frenetic, DJ-mastered 'Aural' and then relaxes us back into a revisiting of Morricone's very own 'Le Clan Des Siciliens.'

That's backed by another dynamic delve into Morricone's past on the now electronically sampled, and guitar heavy 'The Untouchables' which he follows with the lush Latin approach to 'Ballad for Mr. Kromback' and then the upbeat, guitar-twanging, funky brilliance of 'Essential Blues (with lyrics by Joe Bowie).

The reverberating electronics of 'With the Help of God, Shine' have quickly made this track the stand out for me personally, and that's backed by more frenetic DJ-propelled beats within 'Abidjan,' with the album rounding out on the gentle acoustic guitar work of 'Aural (Reprise),' and then closes out on the drum-led exuberance of 'The Untouchables (Alternative Take).'

Says Rocco, “This record is the story of my musical and private life, through the ten tracks, like the chapters of an autobiographical book."

"It’s also a journey, a long journey in all senses, was conceived from the point of view of the compositional ideas many years ago, shortly after the release of my first and only album Lyndon, but had a very long gestation, due to many factors both external and personal, changes of human and artistic life mainly influenced by the massive events that have affected the whole world in the last twenty years."

"During this time I traveled a lot, for tours and concerts, and lived in some world great musical cities. Especially my three years in Paris, after joining the Defunkt, where I met many African artists who were able to express depths of their native cultures."

"Even now Paris absorbs these important influences and, in musical terms, trains generations of extraordinary esteemed all over the world. All that already happened in New York since forever, but not with African born artists, really hard to arrive in the US."

"It is not a coincidence that Joe Zawinul has taken so many musicians of the last Syndicate in Paris, even if they were not originally from France.”

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