Are you ready to dance some Taranta? Are you ready to hear tambourines beating to the rhythm of southern Italian music? If so, Mauro Pagani is coming to New York just for you. His concert "La notte della Taranta" has been organized by the Consulate General of Italy in occasion of the festivities honoring Italian National Day and will take place at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center of Staten Island on May 31 at 4pm.

The Taranta Pizzicata, as many of you might now, is an ancient dance of the Salento region.  The pizzica is the music that marked the ancient healing ritual against the bite of a tarantula, the dangerous poisonous spider. According to tradition, in order to drive out the demon thought to have taken possession of the victim, usually a woman, tambourines should be beaten incessantly. The dizzily rhythmic sound of the tambourine combined with a frenzied hypnotic dance healed the victim of the poison. Other types of pizzica tarantata are the courtship dance between a man and a woman and the “dance of the swords” also called pizzica a scherma. 

La notte della Taranta is a Festival that takes place every summer in Melpignano, in the Salento region, and is the greatest musical festival dedicated to the Salentine pizzica, combined with other music genres, from world music to rock, from jazz to symphonic music. Maestro Concertatore Mauro Pagani was the Festival's director for the 2007 and 2008 editions. During his concert, organized in collaboration with the Region of Apulia, the Italian Culture Institute, the Fitzgerald Foundation of Florence [2], The United Pugliese Federation [3]and the Snug Harbor Cultural Center [4], he will combine traditional Salentine rhythms with those of the whole Mediterranean area. 

 

Mauro Pagani and Fabrizio De Andrè collaborated for the longest time, particularly during the last years of the latter's life. They wrote together Creuza de mä (1984) and Le nuvole (1990), the first being voted in 1989 by Italian music critics the best Italian record of the past fifty years. The record also became an international success when David Byrne, former leader of Talking Heads and quintessential New York City artist, included it in the list of the ten best albums of the Eighties. Apart from being a record of stunning beauty, Crueza de ma is also considered a landmark of “world music”, as it encompasses virtually all major Mediterranean musical influences (Southern Italy, Balkans, North Africa, Greece, Turkey, Middle East, etc). In 2004 Pagani also released a new version of this historic album, titled Crueza de ma 2004, featuring musicians from Israel and Tunisia.

Additional info:

FOTO DI GRUPPO CON CHITARRISTA 

  (Rizzoli 2009)

with

Mauro Pagani

  Alberto Flores D’Arcais

Christian Rocca

Friday May 29, 2009 -  6 pm

Italian Cultural Institute - 686 Park Avenue, NYC

R.S.V.P. : 212-879-4242 ext.381