Zara Zabara
12/18/2025 - 20.30
Teatro Giovanni Laterza Putignano (BA)
Available after September 5, 2025, and in April 2026 (theatres)
Olivia Sellerio was born and lives in Palermo. For many years, she has divided her time between books and music.
She grew up with a love for stories and the joy of sharing them — a passion that became her craft. She inherited a “paper heart and ink blood,” and it is this pulse, this breath, that first moves her voice — the desire to become a vessel for storytelling, a witness to songs that tell stories twice over, through both music and words.
Her artistic journey began in Sicily but soon led her through different genres and musical worlds, crossing borders and finding inspiration in new and transformative encounters — though Sicily has always remained her point of return.
Deeply committed to renewing the musical traditions of her homeland, Olivia’s work today is a mosaic in which jazz-inflected interpretations coexist with Mediterranean, African, Latin American, and neo-Latin vocal colors. These influences merge in a unique synthesis — a work of exploration and harmony that unites diverse musical languages and styles, weaving them together with the Sicilian melos.
From the international success of Accabbanna (2005), co-written with Pietro Leveratto — an original and captivating blend of Sicilian folk singing and modern jazz that brought her to major national and international stages — to the songs she has written and performed since 2014 for the television series of the Commissario di Vigàta, later released by Warner Music under the title Zara Zabara, Olivia’s path continues to intertwine tradition and innovation.
For her works in the Sicilian language, Olivia has received numerous awards, including:
the Special Prize “Donna di scena” (2006), Donna nel Jazz (2006), Rosa Balistreri – Alberto Favara Award (2013), Efebo d’Oro for New Languages in Music (2015), Donna del Mediterraneo for Performing Arts (2018), A.N.D.E. Award (2018), and the Mimosa d’Oro Award (2021).
Projects
ZARA ZABARA – The Songs of Inspector Montalbano
in collaboration with Produzioni Fuorivia
To mark the centenary of Andrea Camilleri’s birth, Olivia Sellerio performs ZARA ZABARA —
a concert featuring all the songs she wrote and performed for Il commissario Montalbano and Il giovane Montalbano II.
In the songs of the Palermo-born singer-songwriter — who has the rare gift of turning storytelling and emotion into music — Mediterranean atmospheres meet Atlantic sounds, the dust of Africa, and echoes of American folk.
Through her voice, rich with memory and careful words, stories intertwine with the Sicilian melos and with countless roots from other cultures and worlds, weaving a dialogue between Sicily and elsewhere.
They are songs of love and loss, of resilience and protest, of welcome and belonging — sung in a magnetic, dark, visceral voice, a matryoshka voice that contains many others within itself.
On stage, Olivia’s voice is joined by the noble sound of the cello, the pulse of the double bass, guitars that shift with the mood of each piece, the accordion, and the violin — all interwoven in a dense network of melodic lines.
The blend of strings and bows converses with the subtle textures of electric guitar, creating an acoustic–electronic harmony where contemporary sounds meet both learned and popular traditions — from extra-European themes to jazz and the canzone d’autore of the late twentieth century.