The Italian Cultural Institute in Washington, DC invites you to the concert Talea by Paolo Angeli. However you want to call it, nobody else is doing it quite like him. Paolo Angeli, the Sardinian sorcerer, manually crafts beautiful, multi-layered music from his unique designed guitar: a hybrid orchestra built in a single instrument with strings going in all directions, foot-pedal-controlled motorized propellers and hammers to create shimmering drones and bass-lines as he bows, strikes, plucks and strums while producing rhythm treading on a plastic bag and adjusting tunings on the fly. Electronic effects are applied without using loops. With this singular instrument Paolo Angeli improvises and composes unclassifiable music, balanced between traditional Sardinian music, free jazz, flamenco, Arabic nuances, and post-folk music creating a melody like no other.
Paolo Angeli collaborated with Pat Metheny, Fred Frith, Hamid Drake, Iva Bittova, Butch Morris, Ned Rothemberg, Jon Rose, Antonello Salis, Evan Parker, Takumi Fukushima, Louis Sclavis, and Paolo Fresu.
His North-American tour includes a stop at the Carnegie Hall in New York and the concert in Washington based on his latest album Talea, an extended play of new musical pieces crafted by editing different compositions, and making each performance one of a kind. Talea is the result of a 20 years journey in which the sense of belonging merges with the search for diversity.
Presented in collaboration with
LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
PLEASE NOTE: this concert will be broadcasted live by WPFW, 89.3 FM
Preview (via YouTube)
Paolo Angeli
Born in 1970, Paolo Angeli started playing guitar at the age of nine. He grew up in Palau, in Sardinia, an extremely stimulating musical environment. The guitar and the voice of his father, his first mentor, the bus with the drums, the chickens, the melons, the ‘diroccati’ rock groups in an old carpentry workshop, playing at concerts and festivals, all directed him towards a sailing without stylistic barriers in the world of music. In 1989, he moved to Bologna and started to play with Laboratorio di Musica & Immagine and other contemporary music ensembles, practicing collective composition and improvisation, unblocking the borders among musical genres and playing in the main European festivals for innovative music. In 1993, he met Giovanni Scanu, the legendary guitar player from Sardinia (who died at the age of 95), from whom he learnt the forms and the modules of the ‘canto a chitarra gallurese e logudorese’.
Through this ‘fighting encounter’ between the extra-cultivated avant-garde and popular traditions Paolo’s Sardinian prepared-guitar: an orchestra-instrument with eighteen cords, an hybrid between guitar, baritone, violoncello and drums, gifted with hammers, pedals, some propellers at variable speed came to life.
Since 1997, Paolo Angeli performed at the most important festivals in Europe, Japan, Australia, USA, Canada, Russia, South America and recorded more than 50 albums. Currently, Paolo lives by the sea alternating between Sardinia and Barcelona. The 2018/19 World Tour dedicated to his double Solo album Talea will start on January 26th at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Paolo Angeli holds a degree in Ethnomusicology and contributed to the digitalization of the Archivio Mario Cervo, the most important collection of Sardinian records and traditional music. As a researcher, he published Canto in Re, a volume of historical analysis of the ‘Canto a Chitarra’ (ISRE 2005). Since 1996, together with Nanni Angeli, he is the artistic director of Isole che parlano, an international arts festival that takes place in Palau leveling innovation and tradition.