Twenty years ago, if you’d told Michael Occhipinti that the best record of his career would feature the rustic sounds of the Sicilian tarantella he would have thought you were crazy. Of course, he knew what it sounded like: growing up in a musical family with Sicilian roots, it was the soundtrack to weddings and parties throughout his childhood.

But play it? No way.

“Sicilian music was always just there, sort of like the language or the food,” he says, on the line from his Toronto home. “But I wanted nothing to do with it when I was learning to play the guitar.”

Now, though, it’s become a consuming—and creative—obsession for the guitarist, the youngest of five siblings, three of whom are professional musicians.

“I think my dad would have been happier if one of us had played the accordion,” he cracks. But papa Occhipinti would surely have been pleased by the Sicilian Jazz Project, a stunningly imaginative fusion of his family’s heritage with state-of-the-art jazz musicianship. The group’s self-titled debut, slated for release this Tuesday (July 1), is a prime example of how daring musicians can move forward by looking back.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” notes the bandleader. “From the time I started playing jazz, for me it’s always been this kind of… Not a conflict, exactly, but we’re presented with this American songbook, and we all learn it, and for good reasons. But when you go to personalize the music, what are you going to do? And really, what we should do is inject our own history into this thing.”

And so he’s canvassed his Sicilian cousins for tunes, checked out contemporary folk groups from the island, and gone back to the field recordings that pioneering ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax made during the 1950s—a particularly fruitful, and appropriate, source.

“He did these recordings in Sicily in 1954, and my parents left in 1952 and 1953,” Occhipinti explains. “So I kind of liked that coincidence: Lomax recorded one or two things in my parents’ hometown, and I just kind of liked the idea that he was capturing the sound of the place as they would have heard it.

“His field recordings were completely raw,” he adds. “I mean, they’re amateur performances, they’re not professional; it’s not like there’s fancy arrangements. So I kind of liked not being burdened by how someone else approached it, or by the instrumentation they used. It was almost like a blank slate.”

Occhipinti’s reimaginings don’t sound like pure Sicilian music, nor are they intended to. Instead, they’re the sound of a musician who knows where he came from and where he’s going—and that’s a beautiful thing.

The Sicilian Jazz Project plays David Lam Park on Sunday (June 29).