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Rating: Every now and then, even here in Friuli, we can enjoy good music.
Robert Fripp, one of the greatest and most revolutionary guitar heroes in the history of music, was one of the numerous artists present at the Udin&Jazz festival in the 2006 edition, but this time not as a member of King Crimson, nor in the guise of the usual "boastful" guitar hero, but as a Guitar Maestro.
Because perhaps not everyone knows that uncle Fripp, after the disbandment of the second formation of King Crimson, founded the Guitar Craft foundation, a guitar school where the instrument is not just a means to express one's own emotions, but also a tool for the personal growth of the musician, enhancing his human dimension, thanks to various philosophical influences and concentration techniques like yoga, all combined with the Alexander technique, which allows artists to express their emotions not only through limited sound capabilities but also by utilizing body and movements.
In this school, they use very flat acoustic guitars, almost as flat as electric ones, but with a sharp and harmonic sound. These are the "Ovation" guitars, tuned with the fifths tuning invented by Maestro Fripp, called the "New standard tuning", which requires a notable finger technique for both the right and left hands, additionally surprising the attention of the unaccustomed listener hearing this type of chords for the first time.
Hernan Nunez, Martin Schwutke, Ignacio Furones, Leonardo Requejo, Daniel Arias, Fumihito Hatano, Mariana Scaravilli, Shinkuro Matsuura, Luciano Pietrafesa. These are the names of Mr. Fripp's students who performed on June 24th at the Palamostre in Udine under the name The League Of Crafty Guitarists.
The nine guitarists appeared on stage all dressed in very simple all-black outfits, one behind the other, in strict silence, to position themselves on the nine chairs placed slightly in a semicircle. Each time they started "passing the notes", playing a note and moving the guitar neck towards the center with a harmonious and slow movement allowed the next guitarist to "have their say", to do the same. After the "introductory round", one by one, they began to play their music, which, when associated with other members of the Guitar Craft, formed a mix of viewpoints and emotions well interlaced with each other, hardly appreciable if disassembled.
The group was made up of small subgroups of two, three, or four people who played in the same manner, but these changed every time the tempo of the song changed, thus forming new subgroups with different people inside them. These subgroups could be noticed either by watching the movement of the musicians' hands, but also in an even simpler way, demonstrating their expressive ability through performance, through their bodies to express their emotions. This other way to discover the subgroups was the fact that the members of these subgroups continuously looked at each other (or each other's guitars), denoting a sharing that went beyond the uniformity of thought, creating a deep bond within this group.
Robert Fripp had solely the role of introducer. Every time the group had to enter, the great guitarist performed alien and astonishing sounds from his Gibson Les Paul. Sounds with harsh and distorted timbres, called by him Frippertronics, which at times seem like sirens’ laments, sometimes violins, and occasionally even flutes instead of a guitar, are the dominant features of the moments when the great guitar hero performs solo. Thanks to the use of Revox reel tape recorders, he manages to amaze the audience with loop effects that attribute psychedelic characteristics to the atmosphere, which transport the listener to another dimension, into a dream, to barren lands where fears and desires mix to relax the mind from its continuous productivity. This technique was learned along with colleague Brian Eno around the '70s and greatly influenced the music of King Crimson (one of the best examples is Moonchild from the group’s debut album) and all the electronic music of the '70s-'80s.
Besides the various tracks present in the 1986 album, interspersing the various pieces with entrances and exits of the students and performances by Maestro Fripp, the League Of Crafty Guitarists performed an astounding acoustic version of VROOOM, which literally drove the audience in the hall crazy, and an unamplified version of one of the Guitar Craft pieces.
The concert concluded with an ovation for the nine guitarists (just like there was an ovation when the great Robert Fripp made his entrance into the hall, having to bow in front of an audience that applauded him for several minutes), who subsequently toured the theater (always in a row and in strict silence) and with a sea of people unsure whether to leave due to the spectacular and unexpected appearances of the members of Fripp’s school during the concert.
In conclusion: finally a concert different from the usual ones (it seemed more like a recital or something similar), which truly allowed the audience to taste the true aspect of art in music, alongside shattering every expectation of the "classic traditionalist Friulian spectator".
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