Professor of Music Pierpaolo Polzonetti has been awarded a Seed Grant for International Activities from Global Affairs at UC Davis and the Eivind Lange and Mary Puma Engagement and Research in Italy Fund. Polzonetti will use the grant for a project that centers on the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. He’s calling the project the “Umbria Jazz Feast,” as it investigates the perceptions and identity of jazz as it intersects with the cuisine, art and culture of locals, tourists, and migrants from the Global South.

The project will look closely at African-rooted American music and Italian art and cuisine, as experienced by people of different backgrounds and from different countries. A primary outcome will be the production of a documentary film with videographer Alberto Guerri of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome.

The scholarly component of the project will focus on the trans-cultural process of global cross-fertilization, which scholar Fabienne Darling-Wolf calls “glocamalgamation.” Collaborators include ethnomusicologists Marco Lutzu of the University of Cagliari, and Giovanni Giuriati of the University of Rome La Sapienza and Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies IISMC of the Cini Foundation of Venice.

Polzonetti is the author of Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet. Published by the University of Chicago Press, the book is filled with engaging insights drawn from Polzonetti’s research about opera—from its origins as entertainment during 16th-century banquets to 20th-century opera star Maria Callas’s diet.