Trombonist-composer Samuel Blaser is one of jazz's most prolific voices, with 34 recordings as a leader or co-leader since 2008. On Rosina, he delivers his most personal album yet — eight originals drawing on Italian folk melodies and a deep reconnection with his family roots in Emilia-Romagna.

The album takes its name from his maternal grandmother, Rosina Pierina Scarpioni — a wartime Resistance fighter who later moved to Switzerland, and a woman he never had the chance to meet. Reconnecting with family in her native region, and later finding Italian cousins around New York City, Blaser became increasingly drawn to that side of his identity. The traditional folk melodies he encountered along the way — some captured in Alan Lomax's field recordings — offered a gateway: open, unadorned sounds he could reshape entirely in his own voice.

Blaser is joined by pianist Russ Lossing, drummer Billy Mintz, and bassist Masa Kamaguchi—longtime associates who create the wide open spaces, raucous interplay, and sudden lyrical intimacy that define Blaser’s work. “I feel with this project I’m finally shaping the music in a way I want it to sound, where different parts of my musical language are coming together. It’s also the first time I’m consciously linking my music to Italy."