BIOGRAPHY
Carmine Ioanna was born in Avellino on October 20, 1985.
He started playing music at the age of four.
Aged eight, he began to perform in public, both as a pianist and as an accordionist, and when he was eleven, he enrolled to attend piano classes at the Cimarosa conservatory in Avellino.
Aged seventeen, he moved to Frosinone where an accordion Chair had recently started its activities at the L. Refice local conservatory. Ioanna graduated there with Maestro A. Ranieri.
Parallel to classical studies he has always played improvised music, especially jazz.
He collaborated with the Conservatory of Frosinone on several occasions.
In 2012 he worked on the records Il pentagramma della memoria, a musical project reinterpreting the music written in Nazi concentration camps according to jazz categories, starring – beside Luca Aquino – Sergio Casale on sax and flute, and Per quanto vi prego by La costituente, a band Ioanna has been working with since 2011.
In 2013 he played for the album aQustico (Tuk Music) by Luca Aquino, released in Italy in July and in France in November.
In 2014 he published his first album SOLO for Bonsai Music, featuring Luca Aquino on the trumpet and Francesco Bearzatti on the clarinet; at the same time he started a collaboration with the Seoul rapper Loptimist, in an experimental project that saw the accordion mingle with hip pop and that has been released in Asia by the label Kemistreet.
In the same year he recorded the album Zingaria in Olanda with the Lokomarket, published by O.A.P. Record, and participated in The Threepenny Opera by Brecht in 15 replies at the sidecar, for which Ioanna produced an arrangement for accordion solo.
Among the projects of 2015 there were Petra, recorded at the Jordanian archaeological site with the Unesco Patronage, and Anime Migranti, a theatre play on the theme of emigration starring actress Claudia D'Amico.
In 2016 Ioanna participated in the ZIC Trio project with Eric Capone and Vim Zambsnrè. The meeting with the French pianist and the percussionist of Burkina Faso produced an album at the end of the same year. The album Irpinia, recorded in Grenoble with the saxophonist Luca Roseto came out in 2017 for Videoradio Music and aQustico vol.2 in duo with trumpeter Luca Aquino (Riverberi label).
Among the new projects, there is his own second album, this time with his new quartet, Soli in Viaggio, also featuring electronics, out in May 2018 again for the French label Bonsai Music and distributed in Italy by Goodfellas, the MELODIA trio with Rino De Patre and Giovanni Montesano (Abeat records), Duo with Francesco Bearzatti, and the music-theatre meeting with Amanda Sandrelli in a duo show named Il tango del Marinaio (Cronopios production).
Also, this year marks the start of a brand new partnership between Ioanna and Ottavianelli accordions, an historical factory based in Castelfidardo, Italy, aimed at developing and innovating the instrument.
Carmine Ioanna has so far held concerts in over fourty countries in the world:
United States, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, San Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Jordan, Israel, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Tunisia, Libya, Finland, Latvia, Norway, Austria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, Dominican Republic,Ukraine, Paraguay, Chile, Cile, Bolivia, Equador, Colombia, Holland, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Kosovo and of course Italy, where he has performed in important festivals.