Barga Jazz 2008 kicked off this evening in Gallicano (just a bit further down the valley) with the first of the “turn around” events – itinerant concerts in various municipalities following the scheme of the traditional “Girando alla Tonda/Turn Aroundâ€. A musical voyage of discovery of the Garfagnana and Lucca province – an open invitation to investigate places of particular natural beauty and cultural interest whilst enjoying a concert of the highest quality.
The group Note Noire who carried the label “gipsy jazz” on the posters where introduced on stage by Alessandro Rizzardi with a short polemic on the nature of gipsy life in Italy today.
More or less every paper and media outlet is screaming out headlines, articles and programmes about what is being hailed “the Gypsy Crisis” with compulsory fingerprinting and mass expulsions for the Roma people in Italy now being seriously considered by some politicians.
He pointed out that the probably the very first people who could truly be considered “europeans” were the Rom and that their music crossed borders and integrated music from right across europe
Roma music plays an important role in Eastern European countries such as Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, the Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Hungary, Russia, and Romania, and the style and performance practices of Roma musicians have influenced European classical composers such as Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The lăutari who perform at traditional Romanian weddings are virtually all Roma. Probably the most internationally prominent contemporary performers in the lăutar tradition are Taraful Haiducilor. Bulgaria’s popular “wedding music,” too, is almost exclusively performed by Roma musicians such as Ivo Papasov, a virtuoso clarinetist closely associated with this genre. Many famous classical musicians, such as the Hungarian pianist Georges Cziffra, are Roma, as are many prominent performers of manele. Zdob ÅŸi Zdub, one of the most prominent rock bands in Moldova, although not Roma themselves, draw heavily on Roma music, as do Spitalul de Urgenţă in Romania, Goran Bregović* in Serbia, Darko Rundek in Croatia, Beirut and Gogol Bordello in the United States.
Another tradition of Roma music is the genre of the Gypsy brass band, with such notable practitioners as Boban Marković of Serbia, and the brass lăutari groups Fanfare Ciocărlia and Fanfare din Cozmesti of Romania.
The distinctive sound of Roma music has also strongly influenced bolero, jazz, and flamenco (especially cante jondo) in Europe. European-style Gypsy jazz is still widely practised among the original creators (the Roma People); one who acknowledged this artistic debt was guitarist Django Reinhardt. Contemporary artists in this tradition known internationally include Stochelo Rosenberg, Biréli Lagrène, Jimmy Rosenberg, and Tchavolo Schmitt. source wikipedia
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*Goran Bregović will be playing a concert in the area later on this month