Olivia Sellerio

In the centenary of Andrea Camilleri’s birth

Olivia Sellerio sings Zara Zabara

In concert, all the songs that Olivia has written and interpreted for the Inspector Montalbano and The Young Montalbano series.

It happens that Olivia was born and raised among books, and comes from an island where the legacy left to humanity by Greek tragedy still resonates. It is in this enchanted, raw, and diverse place she has decided to live; it also happens that she has a voice, and a voice in the chapter, in her very special chapter, with a heart of papyrus and blood of ink to write songs, like these pages of life, which she gathers and sings of in her Zara Zabara.

In the tracks of the Palermitan singer-songwriter, once again capable of transforming narrative and feeling into music, Mediterranean atmospheres, Atlantic sonorities, African dust, and American folk coexist in her voice; a voice full of reminiscences and attentive words, in which stories intertwine with Sicilian melos and a thousand roots of other paths and worlds, shuttling between Sicily and elsewhere.

Love stories, stories of departure and resistance, of denunciation, and of welcome sung by her magnetic, dark, visceral voice: a matryoshka doll of a voice.

In the live performances, alongside Olivia’s singing is Paolo Pellegrino’s rich cello tone, the pulse of Alberto Fidone’s double bass, and the guitars of Lino Costa and Dario Salerno – different depending on the mood of the piece – in a dense matrix of melodic lines: a blend of strings and bows communicating with the skillful effects of the electric guitar, an acoustic-electronic chord favoring the meeting of more contemporary sounds with those of popular tradition, whether they are themes of extra-European origin, jazz, or songwriting of the second half of the twentieth century.

Olivia Sellerio was born and lives in Palermo, where she has been dividing her attention and passions between books and music. She grew up with a love for stories and the pleasure of sharing them, which became her profession, inheriting “a heart of papyrus and blood of ink.” It is this heartbeat, this breath, that first moved her voice, the desire to be a conduit of a narrative, a witness to songs that are tales twice over, of music and words.
A journey that started in Sicily and soon led her through other genres and geographies of music, crossing borders, with innovative meetings, though often with a return to Sicily.
For years she has been engaged in renewing the musical traditions of her land, and today her work is a mosaic in which recognizable jazz influences coexist with Mediterranean and African vocality, Latin American and Neo-Latin tinges, all merging into an unprecedented encounter, a work of research and synthesis that combines languages and musical genres of different worlds – interpreted by Olivia over time – conjugating them interchangeably and with Sicilian melos, from the international successes of Accabbanna, which in 2005 she co-wrote with Pietro Leveratto – a fascinating and unprecedented mixture of Sicilian popular song and original jazz, bringing her to the great stages of the national and international scene – to the songs she has been writing and singing since 2014 for the popular television series featuring the police inspector of Vigàta, collected and published by Warner Music in Zara Zabara.
For her work in Sicilian dialect, Olivia has received the Special Award “Woman on Stage” (2006); the Woman in Jazz Award (2006); the Rosa Balistreri – Alberto Favara Award (2013); the Efebo d’Oro Award for New Languages for Music (2015); the Mediterranean Woman Award for the Arts of Spectacle (2018); the A.N.D.E. Award (2018); and the Gold Mimosa Award (2021).

Produced by Palomar/Rai Com, the songs from the live performance are collected in the CD.
Olivia Sellerio: Zara Zabara, 12 songs for Montalbano, published by Warner Music Italia.
The CD’s graphics and the 32-page booklet are by Olivia Sellerio.

Line-Up

Olivia Sellerio voice
Lino Costa guitar
Dario Salerno guitar
Paolo Pellegrino cello
Alberto Fidone double bass

Songs written, arranged and performed by Olivia Sellerio

In the songs:

There are those who wander the wide world, yet avoid its embrace, and there is a world benevolent toward the weary traveler, to those who leave and those who stay, a dedication, a reminder, A tìa ca lu munnu è granni… (Hei, Listen, for You the World Is Wide …).

There is the pain of parting, separating from one another, of going and staying, of the final farewell, and Tornu dissi amuri (I Will Return, My Love Said to Me) to sing of the parting.

There are unanswered questions. Where was born the day that takes you off the coast of Tobruk, and how many miracles do you have in reserve from Zarzis to Cala Maluk, how many clenched fists in your pockets, and still Anticchia ’i cielu supra ’a testa?
(And Still a Patch of Sky Above?).

There is a saying laden with all the ills of its great island, Calati juncu ca passa la china (Bend, Reed, So the Flood May Pass): it demands bending so as not to break, prescribes resignation, passivity, as the only possible resistance; And there’s the Batuko song and accompanying dance, pagan, savage, lewd, and detrimental to morality according to the Catholic Church and the Portuguese rulers who banned it. Having survived centuries of prohibition in hiding until Cape Verde’s independence, it is now a living, breathing expression of another form of resistance: two opposing declinations of resilience. Batuku di lu juncu is a new song, Sicilian Creole, the antithesis of a condemnation of “quiet living” that urges reaction.

There is a hunting reserve of the last Bourbon king, now a city park, and a Nigerian girl, a desert Morgana who has escaped the waves and landed here, prey to other hunts. Rinnina ‘i luna, (lunar swallow bird), like too many other victims of trafficking, is blackmailed by juju in Ciuri di strata (Street Flowers).

And there’s another slavery, a sentimental one, a story like so many others, a story of a great misunderstanding that confuses love with possession. Nuddu è di nuddu” (e “Nuddu m’avi) (No One Belongs to No One, and No One Owns Me) is its counter-song, a reminder, between anger and melancholy, that no one owns anyone, nor belongs to them; rather, it should be a loan, a mutual loan, as long as it is deserved and granted.

And there was love, and there is, as only songs can express, the love of full moons and eyes dark with a thin moon that meet in Morna music and dance, in Cape Verde, the language, music, and culture of which Olivia encountered and learned as a young girl, and that shaped her education. Here the heart accelerates, the breath slows, and E si sfarda la negghia (And the Fog Dissolves); there’s bad love, Malamuri, that wreaks havoc on it, and Lu jornu ca cantavanu li manu (The Day of Singing Hands) che tra le braccia, non tornerà (that won’t return to my embrace). And there’s love, lost in its changing direction like a river that’s still reborn, and Sciddicassi, amuri, la nuttata (Let the Night Fall, My Love).

There is history, offended, denied; there is crooked memory, distorted truth, and amnesia.

There is damage, the deception of a wrong time, and the return of a hoped-for time of truth and justice; it’s there that history is reborn, Comu aceddu finici (Like the Arab Phoenix), and “turns and returns the air.”

And there’s ‘U curaggiu di li pedi (The Courage of Feet), the emergency with all its devastation and thousands and thousands of fates adrift.

Of the 14 songs that Olivia performs live in concert, 12 are included on the CD Olivia Sellerio. Zara Zabara, 12 songs for Montalbano (Warner Musica 2019). Then there’s U scrusciu d’u mari, (The Roar of the Sea) written in 2020 for the episode “La Rete di protezione” of Inspector Montalbano, a year after Andrea Camilleri’s death and dedicated to him. When asked what he missed most about Sicily, Camilleri, the “master of words,” replied “u scrusciu d’u mari.”

And there are the brigands lurking in the song Latri di passu (Bandits), by extension “people to be wary of,” a story of disappointment, of betrayed friendship, of misplaced trust in those who, supposedly friends, in bad times, turn their backs on us. From a poem by Andrea Camilleri, who twenty years ago entrusted it to Olivia to set to music for the CD Accabbanna (EGEA, 2025).

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