Maurizio Ravalico was born in Trieste, a small town in North-East Italy, in 1963. Throughout a career spanning over 35 years, he has maintained lively and inter-breeding interests in musical expressions as diverse as funk, rock, 20th century composition, Hispano-American and Brazilian music, free-form improvisation, contemporary jazz and the still-craving-for-a-better-name "experimental music" of post-war and beyond.
Between 1989 and 1991 he studied Afrocuban percussion in La Havana, where he built his solid foundations as a conga player; his main teachers were Changuito, Tomàs “El Panga” Ramos, and the family Lopez, "Los Chinos", of the La Havana district "La Corea".
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Based in London since 1991, he was a prominent figure in both the British salsa and funk scene throughout the nineties, and with the new millennium, following various experiences in free-form improvisation, theatre and contemporary dance, he started developing a very personal vocabulary in both his conga playing and the original set-up which is at the core of his solo percussion act and of many of his current collaborations.
Maurizio has toured and recorded with, among others, Jamiroquai, Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Jesus Alemani, Snowboy, Alex Wilson, Dennis Rollins, Greg Osby, Kaidi Tatham, Dego McFarland, Finn Peters, John Edwards, Steve Beresford, Oren Marshall, Dele Sosimi, Shabaka Huchkins, Andrea Parkins, and the choreographers Lea Anderson, Bill T. Jones, Maja Garcìa, Laura Simi and Jane Turner.
The last album of his Anglo-Berliner trio Fiium Shaarrk, We Are Astonishingly Lifelike was one of BBC3 Late Junction’s “12 Best of 2017”, and was included in Gilles Peterson’s list of "50 Essential Jazz and Beyond Records" of the same year. He is currently a member of Tamar Osborn’s Collocutor, Phil Dawson’s Quintet, Loz Speyer’s Timezone, Noga Ritter’s band, the extended string quartet Phaedra Ensemble and the pop band Attawalpa. His first solo percussion album Nobody’s Husband, Nobody’s Dad was released in 2018 on the London-based label Funkiwala, and in 2021 he created and presented The Loud Atlas, a one hour long duet for one percussionist and one dancer with the Normandy-based company Silenda.
His latest work A Thousand Rawhide Diaphragms is an album of music composed and performed entirely on conga drums, is scheduled for release on October 25th 2024.
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Maurizio's most notable past works on congas are “Accommodating Gods” (1998), with the duo Afroshock; the “ezzthetic_ep” (2005), and the psycho-geografic tour-de-force "In Thunder Rise" (2010), with Oren Marshall and Isambard Khroustaliov.
Visit Maurizio's website, www.maurizioravalico.com, and please subscribe to his social media channels.