Born in 1963, Maurizio was an amateur musician throughout
his childhood and adolescence; he played guitar, drums, flute and,
yes, plenty of the odd clay bongoes, while carrying his studies in
architecture and interior design in his hometown Trieste, Italy.
He turned full attention to music at 21, when he
began studying conga drums. By 1986 he had abandoned any other form
of livelihood, and officially started his full-time career as a musician,
playing for theatre, and local jazz, salsa and rock bands.
Between 1989 and 1991 he went through an intensive period of study
of Congas and Afro Cuban Percussion, frequently visiting La Havana,
Cuba, and learning from Tomàs “El Panga” Ramos,
Changuito, Los Chinos and many others.
He moved to London in 1991, and quickly established
himself as a session musician.
Quite an active presence in the British Funk scene throughout the
nineties, he was the percussionist of Jamiroquai
during their “Emergency” and “Space
Cowboy” period, and of the James Taylor Quartet
from 1994 to 1998; plus a number of less notorious acts with some
of the most important artists involved in that scene, such as Mike
Smith's The Whole Thing and Dennis Rollins.
During the same decade, in different stages, he was involved in most
of the Salsa and Cuban related project to originate from London. His
collaborations in that field include, amongst others, Jesus
Alemani, Snowboy, Alex Wilson, Tumbaito, Herman Oliveira.
He has also toured, played or recorded with Paul McCartney,
Paul Young, Kaidi Tatham, Dego McFarland, Finn Peters, John Edwards,
Steve Beresford, the choreographer Lea Anderson
and many more.
With drummer Davide
Giovannini he co-founded the duo Afroshock,
the activity of which spanned from 1989 to 2000. Afroshock released
only one album, in 1998: “
Accommodating Gods”, a creative tribute to the music of
Cuban Santeria, still talked about by the few hundreds who bought
it as one of the most important works for percussion music to come
out of the UK in the nineties.
In 2000 Maurizio joined Ezzthetic,
a community of visual artists, actors, musicians and artists from
other disciplines based in Italy, with whom he collaborated on a number
of productions in the fields of theatre, cinema, installation and
visual art.
In October 2005 Ezzthetic released their only commercially available
CD, called simply “ezzthetic_ep”,
out in UK with the F-IRE Label. After the release of the EP, with
an abrupt braking, Ezzthetic ceased its activities as a collective.
After this experience, back as a full-time Londoner
and eager to pursue the paths of research and experimentation opened
during the Ezzthetic years, Maurizio started a collaboration with
the tuba player Oren
Marshall, and began developing a personal language in improvised
music.
In the same period he started working with the
electronic musician Sam Britton (aka Isambard
Khroustaliov), from the laptop duo Icarus.
The duo's first album “Five
Loose Plans” was released in 2006 with the label Not
Applicable. Together with other discographic collaborations of
Sam and Ollie
bown, the other half of Icarus,
Five Loose Plans contributed in enlarging the catalogue
and broadening the scopes of the label, originally intended solely
as an independent outlet for the Icarus recordings.
Not Applicable
eventually consolidated into a team of like minded video and music
artists, which toured UK and Europe in 2006 as The Not Applicable
Artists Project and started, in 2007, a series of regular
evenings of music in London, called Appliances.
Many of the performances recorded during the Appliances
nights have been included in the mammoth-size release “An
Introduction to Not Applicable” (2008), which is freely
downloadable from the Not Applicable website.
Maurizio is also involved in two of the F-IRE
collective projects, the sextet Meta
Meta and the
F-ire Large Ensemble, he is a proud member of Dele
Sosimi's Afrobeat Ensemble, and he plays percussion for several
contemporary dance schools around London.
Maurizio has recently been spending an increasing
amount of time in Berlin, where he has been consolidating his collaborations
with the German faction of Not Applicable. With Isambard Khroustaliov
and Rudi
Fischerlehner he has recently co-founded the FIIUM
SHAARRK trio, which last May has recorded the music for a forthcoming
release. During the months of July, August and September 2010 Maurizio
will be living in Berlin.
The first album of the Oren Marshall / Maurizio
Ravalico duo, In
Thunder Rise, will be released this Autumn with the Not
Applicable label.