Rosa Tatuata with Michela Musolino

Italian Traditional | New York, NY

Michela Musolino grew up in a household where Sicilian dialect was spoken so the children wouldn’t be able to understand the adults’ conversations. The sounds of that language were like music to Michela and she fell in love with them. Listening to those sounds made her curious, hungry to understand and determined to join in the conversations.  On trips to Sicily, she’d become enamored of the traditional folk songs and began to collect them, scouring tape bins with her dad trying to find recordings she didn’t already have. Years later, she’d join the NYC -based theatre company, I Giullari di Piazza, and for three years performed with them Southern-Italian folk music and dance.

Once Michela started her journey as a performer, she was surprised and delighted to learn that her paternal grandmother played the frame drum and her great-grandmother was known for her drumming and dancing!

After she met guitarist, organetto player and folklorist, Phil Passantino Michela began a fun collaboration: singing arrangements that are hot and haunting from a repertoire of Sicilian and Calabrese songs mixed with the traditional songs from the Meridione (Southern Italy). With Passantino she has performed live on Time Warner Cable Television and in April of 2015 on Broadway for a One-Night-Only benefit performance of Tennessee Williams’, “The Rose Tattoo.” The Tony-Award-winning director Doug Hughes invited Michela to bring Sicilian folk music to the production, just as Williams originally included it in his homage to love and Sicilians.

That project inspired the formation of the band, Rosa Tatuata.  Michela joined by Phil Passantino, Charlie Rutan and Jeffrey Panettiere perform the folk and roots music of Sicily with some Southern Italian songs added for good measure.  Rosa Tatuata’s shows are just the right mix of ballads and raucous tunes to make everyone dance for joy and fall in love. 

Lending her voice to film, Michela can be heard on the soundtracks to Anthony Fragola’s  Un Bellissimo Ricordo, a documentary on the life of  anti-mafia activist Felicia Bartolotta Impastato and Mark Spano’s documentary about Sicily, Re-Imagining Sicily.