Fiamma Fumana Official WebSite

Post for new year’s wishes: not entirely unexpected, but very sincere nonetheless. 2008 will bring about a lot of news, including some pretty major ones. But this is no time to speak about them: today is a day for wishes and fond messages. Another year is past, our lives have moved on, and music has not stopped either. On the contrary! Andrea has shot the movie on the Mondine choir and us - Andrea, when are you going to finish it? - we started collaborating with a very fine British agent, we have a new drummer that the world envies, Jessica has made a great solo album.. For me the best sign of life in 2007 has maybe been the start of an orchestra of piva emilianas (!) called, appropriately, “le pive nel sacco”, which is totally untranslateable. Sure, we are still the flag carriers of a very marginal, semidead culture, but we are holding our ground, and we can enter 2008 with a clear heart and even a pinch of pride. Thank you all, thank you so much for sharing this with us in 2007, stay close to us in 2008 too. Knock knock. Hello? Mr. 2008? May we?

Davide Ferrario and Andrea Zambelli, producer and director of “Mondine - From mother to daughter” (the documentary about Mondine di Novi and Fiamma Fumana. I write about this here and here) have decided to move the film premiere from the spring to the Fall 2008. And for a very good reason: there is a lot of very high quality footage, they need extra time to edit it and make a wonderful film, that will make people laugh and cry. So we decided to reform and relaunch the project’s blog: also, we will do several things with the Novi choir from here to the Fall. We have a new domain (mondine.it) and a new group, with my old friend Valeria Carletti as the main blogger and a more recent friend, Freddy Mascheretti, to take care of the relevant technology. We have a guru too, Luca “Vanz” Vanzella of Daimon and Maestrini per caso: he has been so kind as to give us some good advice over dinner (Eritrean restaurant), but of course he bears no responsibility over our modest, utterly unprofessional blogging efforts. And good luck to us! You can find the new blog here./

Great party in Novi: a big meal to celebrate Christmas with mondine. We ate (excellently, as always when these ladies are involved), we sang a lot and we enjoyed sketches of folk theatre (in dialect) by the Gruppo Padano di Piadena, who by the way sing VERY well, they are a sort of male mondine. A nice discovery! Mondine also set up a Christmas-themed theatrical piece of their own titled “If the three Kings were women”: Agnes was particularly unforgettable as the Ox, with a sign saying “mad cow” hanging from her neck. Great stuff. Happy Christmas to all!

Lady Jessica was here yesterday to meet a few people together with us. She brought us an anticipation of her album, a “remix” of field recordings (collected in the 60s) of folksongs in the Arezzo area. It’s called “In dote”(roughly “My dowry”), and is SO BEAUTIFUL, full of love and respect for the tradition of music, language and culture that consotutes the dowry of our Tuscan Lady, and of us all, really. It will be released in a matter of days by Suoni e Armonie, and I think it is one of the best Italian folk music albums ever made. I am so happy!

Thanks to Freddy, who found two of our videos on National Geographic’s website. From the logo you can tell that they got them off the folks at LinkTV. One is the Tre sorelle videoclip: the other one is so rare that even we did not have it, it’s live footage of 1.0 at Winnipeg Folk Festival 2004. But now we’ve gotten hold of it, uploaded it onto YouTube and we can show it to you! Here it is:

Carina l’esperienza di BandaBooster a Pescara! Tre giorni di prova e via, tutti sul palco del Teatro Sant’Andrea a suonare insieme: Mauro di Buen Retiro, Giovanna e Emiliano di Jam Esther, Luigi di Zendavesta, Enrico Lombardi, Tony Nevoso, Cisco, Giovanni Rubbiani ed io. Nella prima parte dello spettacolo abbiamo fatto cover, da Johnny Cash ai Muse, Da Brian Eno a Rino Gaetano, alternando le diverse voci soliste (tra cui anche quella di Cisco): nella seconda parte abbiamo suonato pezzi dell’album di Cisco e dei primi Modena City Ramblers, cominciando in trio acustico voce-chitarra-fisarmonica e venendo poi raggiunti dall’intera BandaBooster per il gran finale.

C’è stato anche un bis (Ninnananna…), ma l’abbiamo suonato soltanto Gio, Cisco ed io, senza amplificazione, seduti sul bordo del palco, con la gente seduta sulla moquette ai nostri piedi e a luci accese. Il custode del teatro aveva acceso le luci di prepotenza, si vede che voleva andare a casa!

Grazie a tutti, ai ragazzi dei corsi di Booster (sul progetto Booster trovate più informazioni sul blog di The Hub), all’organizzazione, ai miei vecchi amici e splendidi quarantenni Gio e Cisco. Bella serata, bella esperienza, alla prossima.

Sono a Pescara da tre giorni, con Cisco e Giovanni, a preparare lo spettacolo di Bandabooster. Scrivo giusto due righe perché siamo molto impegnati, ieri abbiamo fatto le due in sala prove. De resto si tratta di preparare uno spettacolo in tre giorni scarsi, con gente che non ha mai suonato insieme! Comunque è divertente. Adesso vado in teatro per le prove generali. Informazioni qui.