Le Sorelle Marinetti are the unlikely offspring of the glorious era of Italy’s inter-war radio broadcasting corporation EIAR (from which today’s RAI sprang). The three warbling sister grew up listening with near-autistic dedication to the great Italian singers of the 1930s, such as the Trio Lescano, Silvana Fioresi, Maria Jottini, Alberto Rabagliati, Natalino Otto, and Odoardo Spadaro.
After endless hours of practising in front of the mirror in their dressing-room using a hairbrush for a mic, the Sorelle Marinetti one day found they were crooning in unison with the classic harmonics and timbre of the female vocal trios of yesterday.
First spotted by Giorgio Bozzo while attending a small competition for new voices, the trio found their bearings remarkably rapidly, and soon grasped the rules of the world of professional show business.
Entrusted to the guidance of Christian Schmitz, who curated the arrangements and the transcriptions of the repertoire – from the very first practice sessions in the recording studio the Sisters put together some brilliant takes on such popular period numbers as “Tuli Tulipan” (by the Trio Lescano), “La gelosia non è più di moda” (Jealousy is out of fashion; Trio Lescano), and “Non sei più la mia bambina” (You ain’t my babe no more; Delia Lodi).
Now that their talent was getting attention the production crew began piecing together the first album, with a mixture of smash hits of the Lescano Trio and transcriptions of other popular Italian melodies from the 1930s, alongside numbers sung by the fabled Andrews Sisters (from which the Lescano girls drew their inspiration), Italian translations of Cole Porter songs, and other standards of swing.
Conducted by Schmitz, the professional band that has coalesced around the Sorelle Marinetti is composed of Christian Schmitz (piano), Riccardo Tosi (drums), Paolo Dassi (double-bass), Pierluigi Petris (guitar) Alberto Ferrari (clarinet and sax), Riccardo Gibertini (trumpet), and Alberto Bollettieri (trombone).
Although they sing as one voice, the three sisters have distinctly different characters: the eldest Turbina is the more staid and sober of the three, Mercury is the dreamy sentimentalist, while Scintilla is flighty and flirtatious.
These three sisters with the gift of swing in their blood are always itching to get onstage and sing to an audience, as they revealed when the popular television host Piero Chiambretti invited them onto his show Markette (on the Italian TV La 7) and the trio broke fearlessly into their trademark version of “Tuli Tulipan” and brought the house down.
February 2008 saw the release of the trio’s first album “NON CE NE IMPORTA NIENTE” (We Don’t Give a Damn), produced by Giorgio Bozzo and Christian Schmitz. Also the handiwork of Giorgio Bozzo’s production studio P-NUTS was the live concert staged with the same title at the CIAK Theatre in Milan on 7 March. In its first three nights the show “NON CE NE IMPORTA NIENTE” culled 1,700 enthusiastic spectators. And this was only the beginning. The press suddenly woke up to the “girls” and devoted numerous pages to their work, while television channels jostled to be first to give airtime to the Marinetti’s antics. Meanwhile theatres up and down the country have booked them for summer shows and music festivals, and their forthcoming gig at Cremona on 14 October is already taking advance bookings.