Unknown People / Quelli che bruciano la frontiera
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Unknown People / Quelli che bruciano la frontiera
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Terrae
Moncef Ghachem, Biagio Guerrera and Pocket Poetry Orchestra From Sicily come two new recordings featuring native musicians collaborating with North African and Middle Eastern artists. Both records have serious stuff on their minds – immigration, war, political oppression, and the flow of people, culture and commerce between the shores of the Mediterranean. In addition to their frankly programmatic intent, Unknown People and Quelli che bruciano la frontiera share a similar sound that straddles Mediterranean folk, world, and Western classical music. And both suffer from a hermetic quality that will make them largely inscrutable to listeners from outside the Sicilian/Maghrebi/Levantine worlds. Unknown People is the second album by Terrae, a quartet comprising Cesare Frisina, vocals and violin; Antonio Livoti, guitar and vocals; Francesco di Stasi, bass and vocals, and Giorgio Pizzi, percussion, electronics, and vocals. The core group is augmented by eight guest musicians and, on one track, a choral group. Livoti and Di Stasio are Terrae’s auteurs; they’ve written and adapted all the material, original and traditional. The album is dedicated to “all those who in 700 years of Sicilian history have fought for freedom, justice and truth and have been excluded from the official history and from the collective memory.” The songs evoke epochal moments in the island’s history, rebellions and popular movements for social justice, including anti-Mafia struggles. “Inestra Russa” commemorates the communist peasants massacred in 1947 at Portella delle Ginestre by the mobbed-up bandit Salvatore Giuliano; “La Vida Breve,” in Sicilian and Spanish, lauds the Spanish Republic (Sicilian and other Italian partisans fought for it) and laments its crushed hopes (“anarchy, sweet word”), and “Ciciri Francisi” recalls the Sicilian Vespers, the 1282 uprising against the island’s French occupiers. “C’è cu cci pensa” speaks of contemporary Sicily and the assassinated anti-Mafia leaders Peppino Impastato and Placido Rizzotto. You’d think that the music on Unknown People would convey the drama of these themes. But for the most part, it’s all too over-thought and arty (e.g., the Vivaldi-ish strings in “Ciciri Francisi”). The music rarely becomes startling, tempestuous, or in any way exciting. You get a sense of what the record could have been from the album’s best track, “Quanto basinicò,” a traditional number arranged for acoustic guitar, strings, and electronics and sung beautifully by Simona de Gregorio in an emotive style reminiscent of the great Sicilian folk singer Rosa Balestrieri. Its melding of tradition and innovation yields an entirely successful experiment; too bad the rest of the album doesn’t work as well. The Pocket Poetry Orchestra was formed in 2007 by Biagio Guerrera, from Sicily, in collaboration with the Tunisian poet Moncef Ghachem and the avant-folk quartet Dounia, which features the extraordinary Palestinian singer Faisal Taher. Since moving to Italy in 1980, Taher has recorded and performed with numerous Italian artists, mainly from the south and Sicily: the Sicilian group Kunsertu, Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu, and Sicilian trumpeter/singer/bandleader Roy Paci. The other members of Dounia are guitarist Vincenzo Gangi, bassist Giovanni Arena, and percussionist Riccardo Gerbino. Quelli che bruciano la frontiera – “those who burn the border” -- is an Italian translation of harraga, an Arabic term referring to undocumented immigrants. The album comprises nine poems, set to music, whose theme is immigration from North Africa and the Middle East to Italy, and the movements for social change within the Arab world. One track hails the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia and Egypt: “The old Mediterranean order is changing forever/let’s hope that the new order bears the faces of these young people.” The CD notes give brief summaries in English of the themes of each poem, but do not reproduce their complete texts in English translation. So unless you know Italian, Sicilian, French and Arabic, you’ll get only a general idea of what the poems are about. Without a full sense of the poetry’s meaning, you’re left with pure sound, the voices of Guerrera and Ghachem reciting, and the musical arrangements of each poem. But for the most part the music isn’t distinctive enough to stand on its own and compensate for the language barrier(s). Too often it’s an undigested mélange of various related but distinct musical cultures -- Sicilian, Arabic, Indian and African. The stronger tracks are the more song-like, with the verse sung rather than recited. “El Khiam,” an anti-war poem about the effects of “smart bombs,” is affecting because of the blend of Arena’s bowed bass and Faisal Taher’s thrilling voice. “Rosa Viola,” another standout, begins with the speaking voice of Biagio Guerrera’s grandmother, whose tales of sea voyages in her husband’s merchant ship inspired her grandson, and segues into Guerrera singing his poem, accompanied only by sax and contrabass. Listening to music can prompt some weird mental leaps, and Quelli che bruciano la frontiera put me in mind of a song-poem that became a pop hit back in 1968: Donovan’s “Atlantis,” a hippy-dippy recitation about the mythical lost underwater kingdom that boasted an indelible chorus (“way down below the ocean/ where I wanna be/ she may be”). That’s what Quelli che bruciano la frontiera could have used – a few earworm choruses to make the pieces stick in the mind. Unknown People and Quelli che bruciano la frontiera are thoughtful, well-made albums with excellent production values. And both offer object lessons in the pitfalls of repurposing folk or “ethnic” material as art music. Compare these two recordings with the work of pizzica revivalists and renovators like Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, a mostly acoustic outfit, or the electronica of Nidi D’Arac, or Eugenio Bennato’s “taranta power” fusions of pizzica and other Mediterranean idioms, or Roy Paci’s inspired and often irreverent versions of Sicilian canzone. Those artists give new life to traditional music, making it sound fresh and exciting, so much so that it transcends barriers of culture and language. In the past year or so I’ve seen American audiences unfamiliar with the pizzica of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino or Paci’s “suono global” go crazy for both bands. (Canzoniere, in fact, went over so well on their 11-city North American tour during the fall of 2011 that they were invited to perform at New York’s annual Global Fest in January 2012.) It’s hard to imagine the studied, self-consciously artistic efforts by Terrae and Pocket Poetry Orchestra having that impact anywhere, on any audience. - George de Stefano You can hear tracks from both CDs here CDs available from cdRoots
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