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”).
Luciano Sartirana, ebullient Milanese film director and cinema teacher, informs us that Madrigale, his latest film, will take part in Venice Film Meeting 2007. VFM takes place in Venice alongside Venice Film Festival. The film will be shown on Tuesday 4th September at 3.30 p.m. at Astra theater. bring your dinner jackets, you may be rubbing shoulder with Keira Knightley for the happy hour. As proud authors of the end title’s soundtrack, we too deserve a few congratulations.
In the meantime, the website of Rossofuoco, the film production company of Davide Ferrario and of Mondine - From mother to daughter.
Playing Solfest was a lot of fun. British festivals, I had been told, are a totally separate experience. And it’s true: there is a great variety of music and activities, from puppets to raves, from children’s games to an indie music stage. And people are out to have some serious fun: many wear fancy dresses, so that the audience is crowded with superheroes, pirates, vikings, brightly coloured waliking beverage cans and even a dragon; and if the costume requires to stand half (or three quarters) naked in the rain with 12 Celsius, Brits are happy to call their Norman-Viking roots into action and just do it. When we went on (just before Badly Drawn Boy) the sun came out, a lot of people came from the whole area to rally at stage front and started to dance. Great fun! I hope to be back soon. I think we will.
Something funny: Chumbawamba ended their set with… Bella ciao!
The only Italian show of our summer tour 2007, Radicazioni festival, was really something different. The 700 sould of Alessandria del Carretto (”the highest village in the Pollino National Park”), together with about a thousand visitors, gave life to a real zampogna (the Southern bagpipes, as opposed to our Emilian piva) rave. Musicians from 10 to 80 years of age played until 6 in the morning, everyone danced like there was no tomorrow and in the raffle you could win a zampogna (first prize) and a live goat (second prize… I suppose you could make it into a zampogna!). I was almost shy of playing tunes in 4/$ to this crowd! The people to thank for this event are a group of village youngsters led by Paolo, student in Cosenza, a vague resemblance with young (Ernesto Che) Guevara. Really good, we northerners should learn from them!</lang_en>
AAARGH! Paolino and I just wasted the night trying to work with the Onda ProTools sessions. Two machines, 4 hard drives, hours spent formatting, partitioning and browsing fora and knowledge bases, we tried everything short of calling in an exorcist, it’s all useless: DAE error -9131, the session loads but does not play back. Or it does, a little, but then jams again as soon as we try some relvant editing. Shame, I wanted to upgrade the show for our trip to England…
You bump into funny stuff hanging out in the web (in this case in Globalquerque’s website): the video of our show (2 years ago) at Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. There’s some rare&unreleased material, like the cover of Fabrizio De André’s Sidun and Immagina before Peter Walsh added his magic touch to the programming. The sound is too compressed, however.
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