Q - What repertoire will you be exploring during your Making Tracks tour?
A: I normally start touring with about five hours of music and I decide on stage what to play. It’s a very creative process, a kind of exploration with lots of space for improvisation too. This means each concert of the tour will be different. Of course my last two albums ‘S’Û’ and ‘Sale Quanto Basta’ will take up a large part of each show, but there will also be new music I’ve just composed and my interpretations of compositions from Björk and Peter Gabriel’s too.
Q - Can you tell us about the Sardinian traditional music that inspires your music?
A: Sardinia is an island with a unique musical background. We are a meeting point between a lot of cultures and at the same time we have a strong and unique island identity. For three centuries, for example, we had Spanish domination and before that, Arabic. Sardinian music is like a big 'arazzo' [tapestry]: it looks cohesive but inside the painting centuries of small changes have taken place. The old polyphonic singing is called canto a tenore: it’s amazing … there are four singers who combine bass notes with overtone singing and a very rhythmical use of the voice. People may have heard of Tenores di Bitti as they have been produced by Real World Records, but each village in Barbagia has a slightly different sound. Even today, we can talk about how Sardinian music has a strong specificity, but we can also discuss for hours about small differences and details between the ways of singing in Bitti, Orgosolo, Mamoiada or Bolothana. Some very interesting and unusual changes have taken place down the centuries. In church music the old polyphony met Gregorian chant, so the harmonies were influenced by that.
In canto a chitarra [Sardinian for “singing with guitar”] we have a monodic tradition with a very complex evolution: it's the fado of Sardinia. In the bells tradition of the church, there’s dance music played in relation to the most important moments of life. Then we have launeddas, an instrument documented from 3500 AD with three pipes and played using circular breathing. The great saxophone player Evan Parker loves this tradition and played with a launeddas player too. Again, every small village has its own variations for this music. Aggius and Castelsardo are not more than 70 km apart but they have a very different repertory. The same is true for Cuglieri and Santu Lussurgiu - two villages with an amazing tradition of church music. Church music and guitar music have really influenced my background. I can use the guitar like a vocal quartet during holy week, or I can play with the bow the role of the singer and play by foot the guitar part! I love to play with a drone and I do it with propellers touching the strings, trying to reproduce a sound similar to launeddas. Since I started to play traditional music and to sing choral music too (a tasgia, the polyphonic vocal style of northern Sardinia), it has been the deeper influence behind my music. At the same time I’m an improviser. I played with Fred Frith, Evan Parker, Iva Bittova, Hamid Drake and many other great improvisers like Pat Metheny. This means I live in a no-man’s land - I use the small details of traditional music in combination with a more open way of seeing the world.
Q - You describe Palau, the place you grew up, as an extremely stimulating musical environment. Can you explain why?
A: Palau is a small coastal village of 3000 people in the north of Sardinia, below Corsica. In secondary school I had to take a boat to go to the island of La Maddalena. In my family, music has been always something very important. I'm at home now as I write, and today I woke up to my father playing and singing, looking for a couple of chords from an old song by Domenico Mudugno. My father has been my first mentor, and on every occasion - like dinner with friends or meetings with the family (my uncle is a great guitarist too) - music has been part of our life. He has a very extended repertory, from Sardinian music to old ‘Canzone Napoletana'. One day he said to me, “why don’t you play guitar?” So when I started to play guitar - at the age of nine - I already had music in my ears. After the age of twelve, I started with my brother to play in a rock band in the village. There were five rock bands playing within a range of 200m! It was so amazing to spend time listening to cover versions from the musicians of my village. It was often many years until I got to hear the originals, and this meant we learned music with ‘mistakes’ too!
As Palau is a tourist village, it is more open than others to all kinds of music. There was also a US army base on the island of La Maddalena, so in the square of Palau there were black people break dancing since the beginning of the 1970s! The same square was used during popular festivals to listen to the great traditional musicians like Mario Scanu, Cabizza and choirs like Coro di Aggius or Tenores di Orgosolo. An old teacher of classical music, Mr Tagliabue, opened a small shop of music and I had some lessons of harmony and counterpoint there too. To live in Palau has enabled me to grow up without borders between different types of music.
Q - Can you describe your guitar for a non-guitar player?
A: In 1993 I met Giovanni Scanu, and one year before I had met Fred Frith. I had a big confusion in my mind. I couldn’t decide if I preferred to play traditional or avant garde music.
I didn’t like so much the guitar at that time … so I started to modify the traditional Sardinian guitar to an instrument similar to a cello and a percussion instrument. Ever since the first prototype it’s been a kind of work in progress: there are hammers like on a piano, pedals connected mechanically to the hammers, motors and propellers, mobile bridges to change tune, 14 outputs and many other things that can be used to change the timbre. I play my guitar like a cello, I use my foot like on an organ and I try to arrange the music as if I'm a conductor with a small orchestra.
Q - Pat Metheny asked you to design your augmented instrument – how did that come about?
A: I met Pat in 2001 in Sardinia at Sant’Anna Arresi Jazz Festival. He had been very impressed by my solo show. After that show, he asked me for a copy of my instrument and we began a very deep friendship, with long discussions about music and life. We have also played live together. Pat used a copy of my prepared guitar (built in Bologna by Liuteria Stanzani and Francesco Concas) in the world tour for his Orchestrion Project.
Q - You studied with Giovanni Scanu, the old guitar player from Sardinia. Can you describe him and his playing?
A: Giovanni Scanu, alongside Adolfo Merella, has been the most important Sardinian guitar player of the old generation (Aldo Cabizza changed the way to play guitar using a plectrum - he was a great master too). Scanu’s way to play traditional music was a bit like the old blues. I mean, it was very simple, but at the same time very deep, and with a unique emotion. In 1921 Giovanni Scanu started to play this music on stage. For me it has been like going inside a mine of diamonds. We spent time sitting in front of each other with two guitars. I had to repeat exactly what he played. There was not any mediation, only sounds and very nice talk about legends of traditional music. He was the key to the older tradition and it was a big privilege to share nine years with him learning all the secrets of old Sardinian music. I could talk for hours about that experience, probably the most important and intense I have had, as it required a complete change in my way of playing guitar in relation to a music arriving from the past.
You can’t talk about guitar music in Sardinia without talking about ‘Gara di Canto’, a competition between two, three, or more singers. In this tradition, canto in re - the most popular typology of song - could be 40 minutes long without repeating the same melody. The guitarist doesn’t know which melody or variation or improvisation the singers are going to propose. There is not time to think about it: the guitarist has to listen and follow the same melody of the singers, using a parallel movement one octave below. It's very difficult and needs years of preparation and knowledge of the entire database of melodies the singers could use. I love to play in support of singers and I play exactly in continuity with the old school ways. I have played with the most important and active cantadores but I decided to live in my own time and play traditional music only in informal moments. Of course I also introduced in my own repertoire a way to develop this tradition, and I engaged with the tradition in other ways. I digitalized the most important museum of traditional music in Sardinia, Archivio Mario Cervo, wrote a book about canto a chitarra, and produced a collection of five CDs with recordings from 1928 to 1967. So all in all, it has been an amazing part of my life.
Q - Of all the great guitar players you’ve played with, who has been the most influential?
A: Fred Frith. I played with Fred in a duo, trio, quartet and big ensemble. He’s really been very important to my way of developing a ‘prepared’ instrument. I think Fred is a great improviser and composer and I love his way of playing guitar as there is always a choice of material in relation to an idea of composition in real time. Of course Pat Metheny has also had an influence on my first steps in jazz, and he influences my way of playing with freedom. I love the way Pat can surf between different kinds of music, suspended between Ornette Coleman, Steve Reich, David Bowie, acoustic guitar solos and projects like Orchestrion.
Q - You are artistic director of Isole che parlano, an international arts festival in Palau. What kind of acts do you book?
A: Myself and Nanni Angeli started Isole che Parlano in 1996, organized by Associazione Sarditudine. The idea of the association is to propose traditional Sardinian culture and values in a creative way, cross-fading with contemporary cultures in order to promote a sense of solidarity, tolerance and community, and to emphasize the social role of art. We’ve done it since the beginning with a communication between traditional music and the avant garde, trying to make a bridge between all different kinds of music. What I love is creativity in music. So it's very important to show how we don't need borders between something arriving from free improvisation or from an old, deep tradition. We combine contemporary culture and avant garde movements with traditional cultures and we promote this meeting every September with a program full of original events, concerts, meetings, workshops for children and important photo exhibitions. Concerts and events take place in archaeological sites (holy wells, tombs of the giants) and amazing places (country churches, Punta Palau lighthouse, Roccia dell’Orso), beaches (Cala Martinella), squares and on a desert island between Sardinia and Corsica like Spargi Island in Cala Corsara. So you can listen to a canto a tenore without a stage, with just granite around you, or you can have a great solo show on a desert island. My sister, Alessandra Angeli, also works on this project with a workshop for children and a very important part of the festival, organized by Nanni Angeli, is dedicated to photo reportage. In a way it’s like the local feel of a small village, reaching out to an ideal global world without hierarchies or dominant cultures.
Q - You are touring with the South African guitar player Derek Gripper. Are you excited about this?
A: Kora is one of my favourite instruments. The sound of kora makes me feel safe, it's like being in touch with yourself in hypnosis. I spent years listening to this music in the mornings and I thought many times of how I could work with kora music played on guitar … and then I discovered Derek Gripper! What he does is amazing, as he follows the kora tradition and lets me feel as if I have been listening to the masters of kora. At the same time, he introduces contemporary sounds and melodies, he develops the tradition in his own way and he does it with the most popular instrument in Western music: the guitar. His way of playing is so fresh that you forget how difficult it is to play the kora tradition on a six-stringed instrument. I can't wait to share the stage with Derek and listen night by night to his music!
