Fiamma Fumana Official WebSite

As I rush on, here’s a score of pictures as an appetizer. Later we’ll upload Medhin’s, which are much better!

The tour – let’s face it – did not start in the best of ways: Virginia Beach’s Festa Italia, though very atmospheric, had the problem of a sound crew that was simply not up the job, so we suffered all through the show. Luckily yesterday we got even by playing a really fun show at Globalquerque, a young (this was only the third edition) but up-and-coming festival held at Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The venue is spectacular: a large, beautiful and well-groomed Ispano-American Cultural Center, with two outdoor stages and an indoor theatre. Managed with competence and infectious enthusiasm by former world music label manager Tom Frouge and his partner Neal Copperman, the festival has great potential: they put together a good lineup, ranging from Baka Beyond to Chango Spasiuk and Global Drums Project (led by Grateful Dead’s drummer). We – modesty aside – kicked some serious butt. How do I know? Because the crowd got dancing at the third song, and we sold lots of Cds!

Now we are crossing Colorado. The scenery is very beautiful. I swear that I’ll upload a slideshow with some of Medhin’s pictures as soon as I get a chance.

Found between the pages of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail (ok, ok I admit it, I had not read it yet, just filled that gap during the Milan-London-Baltimore flights getting to the first show of the tour. My heart grieves, my mouth is full of ash. Your Wiredness, O Wise One, forgive me! And forgive me, you all true believers in the Holy Word of Online Marketing, whose mantle I am not worth kissing etc. etc.)

Through punk rock, we saw a premium on fresh voices, new sounds, vigor, and an anti-establishment sentiment that could have only come from outside the system. It was inspirational to see people out there with no more talent than you, having fun, being admired, doing something novel. To put it in economic terms, punk rock lowered the barriers of entry to creation.

The notion of barriers to entry is used here in a very broad sense, but the meaning is very clear and, to me, very right. Since 1997 – three years before the decline in the recorded music market even started – I have been trying to teach underground musicians to be entrepreneurial. I have quoted extensively Sebastiano Brusco and his refreshing portraits of Emilian entrepreneurs of the 60s, often poorly schooled but endowed with a deep awareness – intuitive, not just formal – of mechanic technology, who would pencil a few numbers on the formica tables of a bar in Sassuolo or Carpi and then just go out, borrow a little money and start a company. This feels like punk to me. Punk somehow implies an entrepreneurial attitude in the sense that “everyone can do that”. Of course this implies taking some risks and go out of one’s role: the farmer, son of farmers, reinvents himself as a machine tools designer and manufacturer, the Arts School kid dyes his hair purple and starts a band. This attitude not only implies, but actually is the refusal to accept the conventional notion of what a machine tool manufacturer or a musician should be.

In this sense I like to put a little punk rock in Fiamma Fumana -and also in my other business as an economist. FF never stood in line waiting for the approval of the small Italian folk music community (part of which frowns upon the idea of trad music played to techno beats): if we can’t convince the circuit of Italian folk-world festivals the way we do in America we just move on, we look for new opportunities, like collaborating with Jovanotti and gaining lots of commercial radio airplay, or making a feature film with producer Davide Ferrario and the Choir of Mondine di Novi. Of course, this does not make me very popular in some circles, where we are seen as blasphemous people that sold out the Music in the name of commercial success (which commercial success, btw?)

As an economist, too, I feel a wee bit the punk rocker. I mix creativity with regional development issues, marketing people with the clergy of high-brow avantgarde culture, hi-tech with everything. I lead workgroups by low-intensity, always-on Msn or Skype chat sessions. I have convinced the (fairly conservative, thank you very much) Italian Department of economic development to run a project - Visioni urbane - through a blog and to seek involvement from the local blogosphere (more on that here). I fight the good fight to keep all decision processes wide open and fully transparent, taking all the risks that come with this. Anyone can click on “Add a comment” and speak out on what we are doing with taxpayer’s money… and I and my people might not like what they have to say. But that will be an incentive to do our very best, and anyway it’s a chance worth taking. We’ve got a wave to catch, folks, a big one which is changing everything. I’m not sure what it will leave behind, but I am ready to bet that the future will carry a healthy dose of punk attitude.

We are doing some serious innovation here, completing our own homemade music Manhattan project: opening up all of Medhin’s sequences and turning off all of the electronic percussions, to leave more room for Paolo’s drum kit. It’s such hard work, so many hours in front of our computers! But well worth it, the show is making a giant leap, we can hear it in the rehearsals we are doing now. Will we succeed in the end…?

Wonderful night out among friends and music yesterday in my native Emilia Romagna. First, dinner in one of my favourite restaurants on Earth, La Lumira in Castelfranco Emilia, run by my old friend Carlo Alberto Borsarini and his family. Then, a quick visit to Bologna’s Festa dell’Unità to celebrate the final show in Cisco’s tour. We got there at midnight, just in time to get on stage for the final set of encores! Stage and backstage were full of old friends: besides Cisco himself and Chiara, there were ex-Modena City Ramblers Giovanni Rubbiani on guitar and Massimo Giuntini on bouzouki and uileann pipe, Francesco Magnelli on piano (with the faithful Andrea, guitarist, and Marzio, drummer); Patrick Wright, fiddler in Dagda (one of Lady Jessica’s projects); Lele, Estragon’s manager, former tour manager with MCR; Cecca, who’s worked as agent both of MCR and of FF; Valeria “miss Myspace”, together with Daniela; and comrade Susanna Bottazzi, whom I had not seen in years, a truly unexpected and delightful surprise.
This is a gift of this age (I am 41): after all those years you turn back and - surprise - you see faces you know well. Some, true, have goptten lost and are missing, but a lot are still there, holding their ground; and you feel you have somehow been holding your own. And you realize that there people out there to whom you are bonded for good, no matter how far you go; and that the chunk of a lifetime behind your back, after all, has not been a waste of time.

It’s just impossible not to agree with standup comedian and top blogger Beppe Grillo’s three proposals, though I would have chosen a more lighthearted title (today Grillo and a few hundreds of thousands Italian in the main cities celebrated a “Vaffanculo Day”, where “vaffanculo” means “fuck off”). Let’s hope that the nobler component of his movement, fighting for higher moral standards in politics, can keep the other - more populist and, I fear, ready to bow to the next wave of establishment. Don’t give up, Beppe. And may the V… be with you!

We’ve got a problem: Ian Smith at Frusion, our British agent, is going through a phase of feverish activism (I think he was encouraged by feedback from Solfest, where actually we did pretty well). In the past few weeks he’s been requesting all kinds of promo material, which is good! Now he wants live photos, he says he can’t find any on the net… Does anyone have any he or she would share? Ideally, I’d like a FTP link or a Yousendit delivery, but normal email is also ok. Thanks so much!

PS - I found this on Flickr; it’s us at Folkwoods Festival, in the Netherlands (photo Deskman)

From the files of the irreplaceable Drew Miller - Mr. Omnium - I got hold of a DVD from a few years ago, shot at Winnipeg Folk Festival 2004 in a beautiful sunny afternoon. I have decided to upload some songs on YouTube, starting with this “Di madre in figlia” (”From mother to daughter”).

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