Taranta Project (Ponderosa Music & Art, 2015)
The Italian conductor, composer and musician Ludovico Einaudi has created works like Stanze, Una Mattina and Nightbook, has recordings like In a Time Lapse, Divenire with Robert Ziegler and I Giorni, as well as scored the music for movies and television such as Alexandria, the television mini-series Doctor Zhivago, Stargate Universe, I’m Still Here and The Water Diviner. Now, Mr. Einaudi has taken on the global soul of Southern Italian trance with the release of Taranta Project, on the Ponderosa Music & Art label.
The project growing out of an annual concert project in Salento, Mr. Einaudi explains, “In 2010 and ’11 I was invited to direct a concert that’s happened for the last 15 years in Salento. It drew 100,000 people and we toured it the next year, recording what we did. After that we did more in the studio, and the result is that Taranta Project has a studio sound, but with all the energy of a live performance.”
Pooling a who’s who of international world music musicians like kora master Ballake Sissoko, electric guitarist Justin Adams, ritti fiddle player and vocalist Juldeh Camara, percussionist and ney player Mercan Dede and the Roma Film Orchestra, Mr. Einaudi unfolds the musical map to aid in the exploration of the music of southern Italy and especially the taranta – the musical form that arose from the belief that a bite of the tarantula spider could be mitigated by a wild dancing trance.
Mr. Einaudi explains the process of the recording this way, “After I put the musicians together the big work after the rehearsals and the concerts was to select just an hour of it for the album. I wanted to stay close to the reality of the music without changing too much, to put myself into the music of taranta.”
The treat of the Taranta Project is that it is a musical bazaar where there are unexpected twists and turns, where the listener is unable to quite predict what’s around the next corner.
Opening with a cinematic feel on “Introcuctio ad regnum Tarantulae” with sweeping strings and revolving percussion, Taranta Project breathes freshness into a musical landscape where there’s not a trace of cute, quaint folk music anywhere in sight. From this the Taranta Project takes off into an exploration of a new global musical map, incorporating folk, trance and classical forms.
Fresh and exciting, listeners get a dose of ritti fiddle, electric guitar and Mr. Einaudi’s signature sound on “Taranta” before slipping into a charm of vocals and piano on “Fimmene” and the desert bluesy/Italian folk colored “Nazzu Nazzu.” Mr. Einaudi sweeps the listener along on a wild and wonderful ride.
Mercan Dede comments, “He took the tradition and he gave it a fresh seasoning from the future. He created perfect balance.”
Taranta Project just gets better and better with offerings like the hypnotic “Choros,” the hard-edged bluesy “Tonio Yima/Rirollala” with slick guitar licks and infectious percussion and the sumptuous “Preludio/Nar I-Seher” with its gentle piano opening before Middle Eastern violin influences emerge and Arab percussion enriches the whole. Fans get a dose of kora on the gently folksy “Ferma Zitella.” Taranta Project ends with the lovely vocal and piano infused “Nuvole Bianche.”
Justin Adams says, “It’s less foursquare than most European folk music. Repetition is such a big part of it and it goes deep into your soul, both when you’re playing and when you’re listening to it. Ludovico makes it go from the epic to the intimate.”
The Taranta Project’s sound unerringly finds that through thread by which musical genres and folk traditions meet at the crossroads and join forces to create something extraordinary.
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Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
