5th February at the Auditorium Parco della Musica – Rome we will have the honor of receiving the award Blogfoolk Choice – MEI for the Best World Music Album of the year . We will be performing a short set for iWorld organized by ICompany .
Category: taranta
TARANTA – Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino (ft L. Einaudi) – Official Music Video
TARANTA
(M. Durante, Ludovico Einaudi)
“IF YOU DANCE ALONE YOU CANNOT HEAL”
“SE BALLI SOLO NON TI PUOI CURARE”
Director: Gabriele Surdo
Starring: CGS
Dop: Flavio&Frank
Concept: G. Surdo
Editing: G. Surdo
Camera Operator: Maham Mehrabi
Key Grip: Luca Perenich
Dop Assistant: Consiglio Manni
Hair / Make-up: Melissa Mariano
Soundtrack: Taranta (Quaranta / Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino / Ponderosa music&art, Italy 2015)
ISRC CODE: IT50X1500001
CGS
Mauro Durante: violino, tamburello, cori
Giulio Bianco: flauti, zampogna, armonica, fiati, basso
Emanuele Licci: voce, chitarra, bouzouki
Massimiliano Morabito: organetto
Giancarlo Paglialunga: voce, tamburello, bendir, tapan
Silvia Perrone: danza
Alessia Tondo: voce, castagnette, percussioni
www.canzonieregrecanicosalentino.net
TARANTA
(testo: M. Durante / musica: L. Einaudi, M. Durante)
io tegnu nu tormentu intra lu piettu
ca me consuma e nu se ferma mai
me tremula la terra sutta li peti
nu c’è mai fine pe lu miu cadire
quiddhu ca mangiu nu tene sapore
pe mie nu c’è chiui luce ne culore
la gente sapia comu t’i curare
ci lu tou male se chiama’ taranta
e osce ca li tempi hannu cangiati
ci è ca po sentire lu miu dulore
e ci me porta l’acqua pe sanare
a ci chiedu la grazia pe guarire
nu sacciu ci è taranta ca me tene
ma nu me lassa e me face mpaccire
ci è taranta nu me abbandunare
ci balli sulu nu te puei curare
ci e’ taranta lassala ballare
ci e’ malencunia cacciala fore
[en]
I hold anguish in my chest
This is killing me and never stops
The ground is trembling under my feet
There’s no stopping me falling
What I eat has no taste
for me there is no more light nor color
People knew how you had to cure yourself
If your ilness was called taranta
And now that time have changed
Who can feel my pain
Who brings me the water to cure
Who shall I ask to grant me recovery
I don’t know if it’s taranta that got me
But it doesn’t let me and makes me crazy
If it’s taranta don’t let me down
If you dance alone you cannot heal
If it’s taranta let her dance
If it’s melancholy throw it out
Solo Andata the new show with Erri De Luca
#SOLO ANDATA
Il Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino ed Erri De Luca tornano a collaborare dopo il grande successo di Solo Andata, che è valso il premio Arte e Diritti Umani 2014 di Amnesty International e la menzione del The Guardian che ha messo il brano nella playlist delle migliori canzoni folk/world.
In teatro uno spettacolo originale in cui tradizione e mito, storie vecchie e nuove convergono in un unico racconto, radicato ai luoghi e agli eventi del presente, scandito dal ritmo del connubio tra la musica e la danza del Canzoniere, e l’inconfondibile parola di Erri De Luca
3 Marzo – Milano – Crt Teatro Triennale4 Marzo – Gardone Riviera (BS) – Auditorium del Vittoriale5 Marzo – Sirmione (BS) – Auditorium del Palazzo dei Congressi(6 Marzo – Siena – Teatro dei Rinnovati)7 Marzo – Monte Urano (FM) – Teatro Arlecchino9 Marzo – Roma – Auditorium Parco della Musica / Sala Sinopoli10 Marzo – Pescara – Teatro Circus
Quaranta in the shortlist for the Best World Music Albums of 2015 from The Huffington Post!!
“Quaranta” keep hoarding prizes, successes and praises! we are in the shortlist for the Best World Music Albums of 2015 from The Huffington Post!!
here the wonderful words of Martin Lipp:
Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino – Quaranta. This ground-breaking group from the heel of the Italian boot marked its 40th anniversary with a fine album of traditional sounds that are made modern not through electrification, but through sophistication and craftsmanship. Beating frame drums and singing soulfully, the group embodies the working-class heart of the music, but makes it plain they are professionals.
Not Quite a Top Ten List of World Music
by Marty Lipp
Quaranta ALBUM OF THE YEAR for Blogfoolk
“Quaranta del Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino è l’album dell’anno di “Blogfoolk”, perché è il segno di una storia che abbraccia passato e presente della musica salentina, in omaggio a Rina Durante, che fondò il CGS nel 1975, e a chi era al suo fianco nel portare all’attenzione le espressioni tradizionali locali. Non solo, perché “Quaranta” è il segno di chi la traccia dei padri, in senso letterale e figurato, l’ha seguita, cantando il male di vivere contemporaneo con suoni antichi, senza passatismi non scordando la tecnologia del XXI secolo. “Quaranta” è dialogo con autori come Erri De Luca, con musicisti quali Ludovico Einaudi e Piers Faccini, con un produttore internazionale del calibro di Ian Brennan; è coscienza di una cifra artistica di tradizione contemporanea da parte di un ensemble che annovera nell’organico alcuni tra i migliori musicisti pugliesi. “Quaranta” non è autocelebrazione, è andare avanti. Se n’è accorta la stampa mainstream anglo-americana, e anche la nostra, se ne sono accorti i pubblici dei palcoscenici world, dove il CGC ha portato il Salento, mostrando capacità di stare in scena, di fare spettacolo, arte nella quale, purtroppo, gli artisti trad italiani non sempre primeggiano. Lo hanno compreso i critici della Trans Global World Music Chart e quelli di riviste prestigiose di settore come le britanniche “fRoots” e “Songlines”, dove giornalisti non di primo pelo che hanno riconosciuto che il CGS è la punta del fertile tessuto musicale del Salento.
Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino – live in Lecce @Dama
ph. giuseppe rutigliano
sul Corriere della Sera dalla penna di Fabrizio Versienti
il magnifico album del Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, 40: tanti sono infatti gli anni di vita dell’ensemble pugliese, il primo a dedicarsi in modo organico alla riproposta della musica popolare del «tacco» d’Italia. Oggi più che mai in salute, con una nuova generazione (il leader Mauro Durante) al comando e una proposta dal forte appeal internazionale sul mercato della world music, pur conservando radici solide nella tradizione.
IF YOU DANCE ALONE YOU CANNOT HEAL
only a few days till the release of our new videoclip! take a look at the teaser!
“IF YOU DANCE ALONE YOU CANNOT HEAL”
TARANTA
(M. Durante, Ludovico Einaudi)
Director: Gabriele Surdo
Starring: CGS (M. Durante, G. Bianco, E. Licci, M. Morabito, G. Paglialunga, S. Perrone, A. Tondo)
Dop: Flavio&Frank
Mauro Durante tells in 5 episodes his history with CGS to the Radiotelevisione svizzera – RSI @Anime Salve
The Huffington Post: Ancient Italian Music for Modern Souls
Beautiful and detailed piece by Marty Lipp on the The Huffington Post about the Taranta mitholgy and its inheritance today!
Features an interview with our Mauro Durante, plus reviews of our Quaranta, along with Ludovico Einaudi, Antonio Castrignanò and Kalàscima.
What does an illness stemming from an ancient superstition and its unusual treatment have to say to us today? Four recent albums from Italy try to tell us.
Centuries before the Italy of today, there was the mythology of tarantism, the belief that a bite from a particular spider would plunge its victim into a grave sickness and torpor. The victim’s family would call a sort of musical doctor who would prescribe the playing of intense music, which the victim – usually a woman – would dance to on a white sheet spread on the floor in her family’s home. The ecstatic dance, thetarantella, could last for hours and would eventually expel the venom and its effects.
According to Mauro Durante, leader of the group Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, the tarantism ritual lasted in the southeastern Italian region of Salento into the 1970s, but may have originated before Christianity.
As the lure of Western modernity consumed Italy as it did so much of the world, the folk traditions of Italy were seen as old-fashioned and stinking of poverty – more worthy of derision than study. Forty years ago, Canzoniere Grecanico Salantino – or CGS – began to revive and celebrate folk styles including the music derived from the taranta ritual.
As the world music movement revived interest in regional traditions, CGS and other neo-traditional performers began to gain a following of new listeners in Italy and then internationally.
While we Americans think we are thoroughly familiar with Italian culture, Italy’s soulful folk music still has not cracked into mainstream consciousness despite the country’s presence in our hearts and stomachs.
Four albums with varying mixes of traditional and non-traditional elements were released recently by the Milan-based Ponderosa Music and Art and are available through the US-based Harmonia Mundi. The albums feel a bit like a set since all draw from the same southern Italian tradition and have several musicians in common. They do, however, add their own shadings to the root style.
Though these neo-trad performers like CGS typically don’t play the actual songs that were thought to cure the spider victims, they draw upon elements of the music. When CGS was founded by Mauro Durante’s father’s cousin, Rina Durante, an iconoclastic female journalist and activist, it was a bit of cultural revolution – a look backwards in a society that was straining toward the future. The band’s leadership passed along to Durante’s father and then to Mauro. In that time, the world has turned a bit toward Rina’s vision, seeing the value of these old-world instruments, songs and rhythms.
CGS’s latest album, “Quaranta,” commemorates the group’s 40 years together even as members have come and gone. Not a greatest hits or compilation, the album comprises new compositions rooted in tradition, but adding new textures. The voices here have a lived-in soulful rasp – not always sweet and pretty, but always intense and arresting. The group plays several sizes of tambourine-like frame drums that give the music a tight, crisp rhythm.
The album – finely crafted in its details despite its rural peasant lineage – also sees the group writing some more poignant tunes like the slow, dramatic “Ninna Nanna,” featuring Valerio Combass on plaintive vocals.
Ludovico Einaudi’s album “The Taranta Project,” is the studio version of a unique concert tour, a mix of genres, instruments and cultures from the northern Italian pianist-composer, who fell in love with the southern Italian tradition.
The minimalist composer keeps an elegant sound true to his classical training, but the album is hardly spare. In fact, at times it can be pretty maximalist. With exuberant African percussion, breathy Middle Eastern flutes and splashes of electronics, it is at times easy to forget this is an Italian album.
Einaudi’s guests Justin Adams of the UK and Gambian Juldeh Camara are members of Robert Plant’s Space Shifters and have their own unique musical partnership, juxtaposing a very modern electric guitar and the very ancient one-string fiddle called the ritti. On a couple of the tunes on which they are featured, they start to make it seem like songs off their own JuJu albums, which is not a bad thing at all.
Einaudi often builds his songs in intensity, spinning together elements from a boundary-spanning palette to stunning effect. As with the traditional tarantella dancing, he brilliantly takes a steady rhythm then makes it more powerful with each measure that comes around, a grand symphony of ancient rhythms, vocals and sounds that the long-ago villagers of southern Italy could never have dreamed of – but probably would have loved.
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Antonio Castrignano does not take as symphonic and ambitious approach as Einaudi on his “Fomenta: Ilenu De Taranta,” but he takes traditional music and subtly weaves new strains into it. With producer Mercan Dede, a Turkish DJ and electronica artist, Castrignano brings out the eastern Mediterranean influence on Salento. The album is fast-paced, befitting the taranta tradition of ecstastic dancing, and creates a tableau that takes Italian folk music back to the future.
The last of the four albums is from the group Kalascima, which titles its latest release”Psychedelic Trance Tarantella.” Despite the title, the music here is not 1960s California psychedelica as much as a who-knows-what’s-next vibe. The group takes the basic elements of the tarantella dance and other folk styles and very consciously makes them new. What anchors it in the tradition is its ecstatic energy and movement – one of folk music’s goals was to animate exhausted workers and Kalascima drives its rhythms hard with a joyous, mischievous spirit.
But what do these exotic and esoteric sounds offer us in the digital age?
CGS’s Mauro Durante observed that the victims of the mythical spider bite were often women in already desperate situations: poor, perhaps in loveless marriages, lost in the dark world around them. “It was one of the only ways to express their suffering,” he said.
Their illness brought shame to the families, as unfortunately happens here among families with a serious mentally ill member or, not too long ago, cancer. He said these ill women were, on some level, reaching out to the healing spirit of community that could come from dancing to the band of amateur musicians who were called in to the victim’s house.
The soulful music from folk traditions embody a simpler time – old-fashioned, yes – but surviving for centuries because it served a purpose for people – our not-too-distant relatives. These old songs and stories “have a power, a magic, that you can feel even today,” Durante said. “And they are connected to really important things. They are connected to contact – something we are losing today.”
“This music, this dance, this tradition,” said Durante, “it is what we are, not only what we were.”
The simple music’s power to grab us viscerally – whether it’s the skin-on-skin pounding of a drum, the raspy call of a voice, the repetition of a melody – remains if we can reach past the veneer of our modern solipsistic sophistication. These four albums from the heel of the boot of Italy are a good place to start to rediscover the vitality of that receding world.