Banda Ionica
Passione

"It is the first light of dawn. In a few minutes, from the abbey mount of St. Michael the Archangel, the procession of Mysteries will slowly begin. At the first notes of the band, an uncontrollable emotion streaks the faces of thousands of believers with tears. [...] These are accumulated anxieties, knots, and worries that dissolve even for those who are not devout,", and how can one not be moved, more or less devoutly, at the arrival of the vibrant bursts of an emotional breath, followed by a procession of rhythmic clarinets, trombones, tubas, trumpets, flugelhorns, and horns, opening the famous "Jone", a funeral march written in 1858 by Enrico Petrella, and still famous today in the southern regions of Italy.

A precious album because it is rare: seven "difficult" tracks played by a band of young musicians (the oldest, in 1997, the year when the recording took place at the Esagono studio in Rubiera, a charming village between Reggio Emilia and Modena, decidedly far from the Ionian Sea, was 21 years old; the youngest, not yet 15) Eastern Sicilians, born between Catania and Syracuse, led by Maestro Rosario Patania (Roy Paci when he wants to play American), in love with the regional traditions of a borderland and of conquest which has been able to draw from the many Cultures that have visited it what they had best to offer. And so we hear distant echoes of Arabian sounds, second Federician sounds, and, closer, military marches and rustic cavalries solemnly keeping pace. We discover unsuspected affinities (for us naive music consumers without deep knowledge of the sonic humus from which delicate stems like our "Passione" sprout) with the tarantulated rhythms of Goran Bregovic and with the soundtracks of Federico Fellini's masterpieces (in fact, Davide Ferrario, in his excellent "Dopo Mezzanotte," makes extensive use of Banda Ionica to emphasize the dreamlike moments); evidently Nino Rota and, subsequently, Nicola Piovani, in composing, have nibbled at this succulent southern delicacy, a wise and savory blend of sweet cassate, painful ‘nduje, and touching red onions. Melodies that, as the pleasant booklet with an introduction in three languages rightly points out, allow one to "display one's tears, relieve tension, eliminate discomfort, and benefit from it". Cathartic psychotherapeutic music.

This record will explain to you why a funeral in Southern Italy is followed by a lavish refreshment, and why the lavish refreshment is followed by weeks of heartfelt mourning. Joy and sorrow intertwined in the same note, in the same instrument oxidized by the salt of a sea that gives and takes, the origin and destination of the life that "Passione" celebrates.