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VINCIO AND CALEXICO ON TH ESAME STAGE IN JULY!

VINICIO CAPOSSELA

&

CALEXICO


together
for two extraordinary concerts

July 1, 2009
– ROMA ROCK FESTIVAL (ROME) – Ippodromo delle Capannelle, Roma
July 2, 2009
– TURIN – Giardini della Reggia di Venaria







“Their music encompasses
the great space, the dust in the crystal air, and that dry
and clean air of their chequered shirts and suntanned skin. A kind of music where flashes of aluminum trumpets sparkle. Mariachi trumpets
on a chromium-plated, repainted music. A refurbished and polished Eldorado”

(Vinicio Capossela)


Vinicio Capossela and Calexico will be together onstage for two special concerts in Rome and Turin. And for the first time they will share the stage first separately and then together, to play a series of songs chosen from both repertoires.

The fruit of the recent collaboration between Capossela and Calexico will also have a place in the setlist: “La Faccia della Terra”, taken from Capossela’s latest album Da Solo (over 70,000 copies sold) and recorded in Calexico’s studio in Tucson, as well as “Polpo”, a song by Calexico with Vinicio’s lyrics and vocals, recorded during the same sessions and included in the Italian version of Calexico’s latest album Carried To Dust as a bonus track. But more surprises are in store.

The two Italian gigs are testimony to the mutual respect binding Vinicio and Calexico. It was Joey Burns who three years ago quoted the Ovunque Proteggi album as one of his favourite records of the year in an article written for the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/..04/23/arts/music/23play.html). It wasn’t long before they first met: Capossela took the stage in the Rolling Stone club in Milano about a month after, in May, during Calexico’s European tour with Iron & Wine. Two tracks was a good way to break the ice. In March 2008 Capossela was in the USA to mix some tracks from the Da Solo album with Calexico producer JD Foster. The two decided to go on the road as far as Tucson, Arizona, calling at Austin, Texas to perform at the SXSW Festival. During the trip Vinicio worked on the lyrics and music to “La Faccia della Terra” (inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio) and brought them to Calexico, with whom he recorded it in one take on the first day of sessions.

The following day was devoted to working on a song by Calexico, “Pulpo”, an instrumental for which Capossela found the lyrics that would turn it into “Polpo D’Amor”. “In the Tucson studio, where the air is clear and the dust is dry like the colour of John Convertino’s faded chequered, always ironed shirts… Where the sky is optimistic like Joey Burns’ sneakers and jeans… Where you can feel like outlaws on the run like John Dillinger and Calexico’s music plays electric in the air, and it blows among high cactuses… We got together for a recording session of frontier tracks.

Joey Burns played us “El Pulpo”, a song with neither lyrics nor vocals which yet had a guitar fathoming like a sonar, evoking sea depths, waving on a winding rhythm base, like a sort of aquatic bolero… He said that he was inspired by an octopus… and I came to think of the loneliness of the octopus in the depths, how hard it is for him to find a mate and recognize her in all that darkness… And he only has even darker ink to send her messages… And when he touches her, he holds on to her to avoid losing her again.

So I wrote “Polpo D’Amor”, where polpo, the octopus, is both the animal and a dance, like tango and limbo… I sang it with the lowest possible way, like a deep message… So that you can dance this “octopus of love” till the end of the depths, among sea-weed and cactus reflections…”


After those sessions, Vinicio Capossela and Calexico met once again onstage on 18 October 2008, again at the Rolling Stone in Milano, the day after Da Solo was released. “Polpo D’Amor” and “La Faccia Della Terra” were the closing numbers.

After the successful “Solo Show” (over 65 concerts and 100,000 people), which ended with four sold-out gigs at the Teatro Sistina in Rome last April 9, Vinicio Capossela is back onstage for a completely different concert, together with one of his favourite bands, Calexico, for two dates which are bound to be unmissable.

Vinicio writes the introduction to Michelangelo’s Rime published by Bur

Michelangelo devoted his life to chasing Poetry, trying to shape words as well. Working in silence for many years on his Rime, he regarded them as silly and did not want to publish them while he was alive. It was his brother who had to. Those verses explore imperfection, transience, heartbreak, an “incomplete condition, longing for completeness”. This is how Vinicio puts it in the introduction commissioned by Bur, which starts a new Classics pocket series with Michelangelo’s Rime. Like a traffic policeman would do, Vinicio leads us into a powerful read, hanging between melancholy and torment, and he uses a subdued, admiring tone, aimed at decrypting verses “a bit intelligible and a bit unintelligible, emerging as if they were sunken in a great spirit”. He takes us into a 500-year old workshop, on tiptoes, careful not to tread on anything, only committed to listening and realizing that words are timeless.

Bur does not place this burden by chance and rediscovers an alliance born with the project Fuggite, amanti, amor – lamentazioni per Michelangelo together with cellist Mario Burnello, when Vinicio was mesmerized by this “language turning everything to beauty”, from which we can “eat dust and warmth, from which we can acquire bodily matter”. From which he can make music. He now has the chance to go further, away from textbooks, from those plastic images of the Pietà we have all filed in our memory and to open the door to an in fieri workshop, where word is moulded. The love for all human life, the torment, the incurability of love desire, the complexity of loneliness even in a couple – this is what emerges from the Rime. Subjects where poetry never resolved anything, the dull-minded might say, but sometimes, like in this case, it did cross the border and opened up unexpected paths. It became a shipwreck in beauty. Because “out lamentation is our claiming God, our sweet dying. And therefore letting our burning oak forest burn even more – it will never turn to ashes”.

Italian Liberation Day concert with VINICIO CAPOSSELA

April 25, 2009
PARMA – Piazza Garibaldi - 9.00 pm

Italian Liberation Day concert with

VINICIO CAPOSSELA
ENZO DEL RE
ALESSANDRO BERGONZONI
FIATI SPRECATI

Look around and look out for those who declare themselves Free.
The flavour of Freedom is fear.
Only those who fear to lose it have the courage to pursuit it.
A multi-act concert on the Italian Liberation Day. Back from his successful “Solo show” tour – 70 gigs and over 100,000 spectators – Vinicio combines his voice with those of people who make their own work a form of Liberation:

“I participated in the ‘Appunti partigiani’ [Partisan notes] event many times. It used to take place in Milan, in the wards of the former psychiatric hospital Paolo Pini, and I tried to give my contribution. This year we were given the opportunity to do something more and to organise an actual concert to coincide with the Italian Liberation Day, where we invited some friends and artists who based their way of living on ‘liberation’”.

Anarchic storyteller Enzo Del Re, to start with. He is one of the most radical figures in the Italian music scene, for his highly political and social lyrics and for his choice not to use traditional music instruments, but only percussions made with reclaimed materials, which sometimes have a symbolic meaning like a chair (electric chair/death penalty) or a suitcase (immigration). His most famous song “Lavorare con lentezza” [Working slowly] was composed in 1974 and used by the small Bologna-based radio station Radio Alice as opening and closing theme for its programmes. His participation in the event in Piazza Garibaldi in Parma is exceptional and precious, since alongside the late Matteo Salvatore he is a prominent figure in the Southern Italian rural tradition. They represent two reference points for our musical expression.

Liberation is also pursued by word master Alessandro Bergonzoni. Comedian, actor, author and theatrical writer, he is a tightrope walker on words, who loves playing with them in an intelligent way, opening up new paths in the public imagination which separate comic from sarcastic, from tragicomic, and who will effectively tell – and make the audience imagine – a thousand meanings of a word like “Liberation”.

Fiati Sprecati, on the other hand, are an obvious choice when we talk about liberation, since they are a street band hailing from Florence who love playing music in a liberation context and defying all sorts of formal bans, including municipal ones. For this reason they will be ready to make the square their stage.

“As a member of society, I am offended by the defamation of this date, which for some years has been coming from the highest government bodies – a date which symbolically gathers our best drives. The Italian Liberation Day belongs to the noblest memory of the history of our country, and it coincides – and always should – with the idea and hope of a rebirth, which could never be as desirable as in these troubled times. And it’s in order to find the “people” again on the streets at last, instead of at home hypnotised by television, that we’ve decided to actively participate in this event. So that it’s something more than a day in which we have to listen to those who on such occasions have advised us to “go to the beach” for quite a long time now”.

The show is produced by LA CUPA srl and booking is taken care of by Concerti e Produzioni (tel. + 39 011.8127525).

Vinicio Capossela (keyboards, guitars, Mighty Wurlitzer, Farfisa, vocals) is accompanied by musicians Glauco Zuppiroli (double bass and Ukulele), Zeno De Rossi (drums and brass band big drum), Vincenzo Vasi (Theremin, vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, samplers and toy piano), Mauro Ottolini (sousaphone, trombone, euphonium and toys), Achille Succi (saxophone,clarinet and bass clarinet, toys), Alessandro Stefana (guitars, banjo, electronica, Autoharp, slide guitar, violinharp).

For further information:
www.viniciocapossela.it
www.concertieproduzioni.it/ http://capossela.warnermusic.it

Amnesty Prize 2009 For Vinicio

With his song “Lettere di soldati” [Soldiers’ Letters], Vinicio Capossela has won the seventh edition of the Amnesty Italy Award, launched in 2003 by the Italian Section of Amnesty International and the cultural association Voci per la libertà [Voices for freedom] to award the best song on human rights released the year before. The ceremony will take place in Villadose (Rovigo) during the final evening of the twelfth edition of the live music contest “Voci per la libertà – Una canzone per Amnesty” [Voices for freedom – A song for Amnesty], from 16 to 19 July.

“I started writing this song during the first Gulf war”, said Vinicio Capossela. “We were all shaking, for it was the first time war had given the impression of entering everyone’s’ house, live on television, making us almost participate in an event. That night at the Teatro Storchi in Modena, Ivano Fossati ended his concert singing ‘Il disertore’ [The deserter] by Boris Vian. I went back home and thought of all these people on the verge of a catastrophe. Everyone felt more scared over here than in the front line. So, like everyone, I became a victim of Fear, the Fear threatened deliberately, which has always found its biggest resonance.

“Years have gone by and that war was followed by others, which were even worse – if possible”, added Capossela. “After Fear, I wanted to try and focus on the impersonality of killing. People blowing up in the distance, without seeing one another. And especially the mechanism of the enlistment rule. The rules of killing. Determining how legal it is to kill. The coldness of the technology of weapons. The employment of surgery to replace broken parts, skulls, limbs to those who blow up. I did it by means of a song and of a heartbeat, trying to objectively convey the denial of man, the consigning of his soul to letters. More real than any rhetoric, letters are those which do no reach their destinations, in the great Fear broadcast live. A song is nothing compared to what people working in organizations like Amnesty International do. So I thank Amnesty International for the work it carries out and for the attention it paid to mine”.

“The song tells us harsh and realistic images of war, with neither romantic rhetoric nor any trace of heroism”, commented Paolo Pobbiati, Chairman of the Italian Section of Amnesty International. “It describes war as the place of total depersonalisation and it leads us into a dimension where man loses his own identity and humanity. Amnesty International and Voci per la libertà gave the Amnesty Award to this song because it made us reflect on the denial of human rights integral to every war, in this first decade of the 21st century still affected by sanguinary conflicts which are often apparently without a solution”.

* All the other news in the news section of the site

Date	Show	City	Place	Price
12/02/2010	SOLO SHOW Canzoni di vino e di riso	BORGOMANERO	TEATRO NUOVO
20/02/2010	CONCERTO IN MASCHERA	MILANO	EAST END STUDIOS	25 euro
06/03/2010	SOLO SHOW	NEW YORK (USA)	LE POISSON ROUGE	$25.00
08/03/2010	SOLO SHOW	MONTREAL (CANADA)	L'ASTRAL	$14.50
09/03/2010	SOLO SHOW	TORONTO (CANADA)	MOD CLUB
10/03/2010	SOLO SHOW	CHICAGO (USA)	LAKE SHORE THEATER
12/03/2010	SOLO SHOW	SAN FRANCISCO (USA)	BIMBO'S 365 CLUB
13/03/2010	SOLO SHOW	LOS ANGELES (USA)	EL REY THEATER
24/03/2010	SOLO SHOW	LISBONA (PORTOGALLO)	Grande Auditório da Culturgest
25/03/2010	SOLO SHOW	LISBONA (PORTOGALLO)	Grande Auditório da Culturgest	€ 20,00 (under 30 years old: € 5,00)

* All tour dates and informations are available in the Tour section

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