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Rating: "Without Alan Lomax, there might not have been the explosion of blues, nor the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Velvet Underground" Brian Eno
"don't know if you've heard of him? He's done a lot of great things for music" (regarding Alan Lomax) Bob Dylan, Leadbelly rap
ALAN LOMAX This review will be unforgivably much longer than usual, but I find it necessary to briefly present the epic compiler of this collection. Is it possible, as Bob Dylan asked, that you've never heard of Alan Lomax? And yet this ethnomusicologist was perhaps the greatest hero of music. In the years when the Ku Klux Klan raged in the southern United States with the tacit consent of local authorities, he risked being imprisoned, beaten, or even killed just to meet the great bluesmen and record with a machine that weighed about 200 kilos the "Mississippi of music that now flows throughout the world." It is to him that we owe the "discovery" (to name only the most known) of Leadbelly, Son House, and Muddy Waters, and it is also him to credit for the recordings, now the patrimony of the Library of Congress, of fundamental artists like Jelly Roll Morton or Woody Guthrie. Being a pioneer in his field, Lomax did not limit his interests only to American folklore, but, in a time when local traditions were still uncorrupted, he made recordings in almost the entire world (Italy, Spain, France, Romania, Yugoslavia, Caribbean, India..) always leaving a strong mark of his passage that benefited all the scholars who came after.
LOMAX IN ITALY As a man of the left, his arrival in our country during full McCarthyism was almost obligatory, but the peninsula he traveled with Diego Carpitella turned out to be no less paranoid than his America regarding the global communist threat. If twenty years earlier in his country Lomax had encountered not a few problems due to the reluctance of black people in providing explanations on the lyrics of some blues, in Italy, during the anti-workers repression, the ethnomusicologist couldn't even listen to the political repertoire of the partisan, poet, and singer of the resistance, Dante Bartolini, who, having just been fired from the Terni steelworks, preferred to sing other songs to the American alongside his comrades. However, apart from this (and other difficulties due to the reluctance of southern women to give interviews and sing in front of men), our country offered itself to him with warmth and spontaneity, and the material Lomax collected excited him to the point of prompting him to later make many new recordings. The heterogeneity of musical styles scattered throughout the peninsula was what seemed most surprising to him. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 A.D.), Byzantines, Greeks, Arabs, Sephardic Jews, Lombards, Germans, Franks, Slavs, Moors, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese, and Bourbons had left traces of their passage even in popular music, which then - before Elvis's hip movements (1954 A.D.) - were still clear. Italy in the early 1950s, despite the spread through the radio of jazz and the splendid Neapolitan song, in fact had no national music, and Lomax - unaware of the sweetened Sanremo standard that was about to impose itself from north to south - prayed that this would never happen.
THE ALBUM Browsing through the booklet (which, like all those by Rounder, is magnificent), the faces of our grandparents, dear debaserians scattered across the peninsula, strike us with a light in their gaze that we perhaps have lost. Listening is a journey for the ears that starts from the south, and precisely, from an island: Sicily. "Zumba lariulà," performed in Maletto (Catania) by a male and a female voice, accompanied by a choir, guitar, flute, and jew's harp, exhibits not coincidentally the structure of Cielo d'Alcamo's Contrasto. With the allure of the dialect, the tender secret story of Nedda and Turiddu (who will be "plucked" by her family) proves, for the many unsaid, not less erotic than the sighs of Gainsbourg and Birkin. In Sommatino (Caltanisetta), we discover together with Lomax one of the most beautiful voices of the collection: that of the miner Giuseppe Infuso, whose "a la sulfatara" blues, with the accompaniment of a simple jew's harp, seems to emanate from the earth's chasms. Landing on the "continent," we are welcomed in Calabria by two fisherman’s serenades from Vibo Valentia and, especially in the village of Cardeto (Reggio Calabria), by a "ballet," whose brief text sung by a choir of women (supported by accordion and tambourine) seems written by Horace ("si nun ballu eu / non balla nuru cchiù"). In Melia, we are received by a "tarantella" (bagpipe and tambourine), and in Feroleto Antico, the formidable Pingitore sisters (three mournful Calabrian women whose voices would not have been out of place on Motown records) grapple with "Alla campagnola." Also Calabrian are a "serenata" and "la strinna" (on a religious theme), while from Basilicata a young woman in "uèje - elì" asks her mother where her love, that is, her life, has gone. In Puglia, the "stornelli" of two men from Martano (Lecce), accompanied by a diatonic, are not the brightest moment of the album, while splendid, once in Campania, is the "Ninna nanna" shouted by a woman from Positano, and very amusing, again in Positano, the "Olive pressing song" in which, to endure the work's fatigue, men transform, with strokes of imagination, the press and the tub into what you can imagine ("e dalle / ih comme vene / adda sà / e 'n' ata botta / quanne l'aucielle ha ritte che la vita / pe' se fa bona e belle 'na jurnata"). However, Campania never ceases to amaze. As the Italian west coast land of supersoul, the performers of the incredible psychedelic "tammuriata" for choirs of sobs, whispers, and screams accompanied by tammorra and tricchebballacche seem to be followers of Hofmann. It's no coincidence that Dionysus stops here, in the warmth, in the southern part of Italy. Already the next piece is a delightful but decidedly more composed "tableau abruzzese". A man, reaching "the Lanciano fair," sings his Baudelairean "à une passant" ("na fijole, quand'è bbèlle / pe' guarda' li pazziarielle / corpe di nù cardille / l'aje perse / l'aje perse tra la folle"). Even the "saltarello" from Rieti, in Lazio, though beautiful, is far from rousing. The "stornelli" from Arezzo in Tuscany are amusing, and the Friulian "lipa ma marica" and the Emilian "Villanella" are pleasant. However, after the Piedmontese "donna, donna" (for choir and band), it is in Genoa that we find what, in my opinion, is the absolute masterpiece of the album: the "trallalero". This is a polyphonic song for falsetto, tenor, guitar, baritone, and bass (where "guitar" refers to a vocal style - I fear now disappeared - where the performer imitated scales and arpeggios of the string instrument). The complexity and inventiveness of the vocal intertwines in this song are absolutely extraordinary and capable of rivaling in sophistication with those of the more famous Sardinian song "su tenore a ballo," immediately following. And it is always with Sardinia and its "round dance" for flute and guitar that the album and thus our journey ends. After listening, we have the sensation of having traveled through a ghost country that has suffered much but seems hopeful for tomorrow, a country that has not yet known the strategy of tension or mafia bombs. And we, looking back, like Klee's angel, are already driven by the whirlwind of history towards the future. Viva l'Italia!
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