Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino Debut New CD CANZONIERE

The new album by Italy's Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino is a "songbook" for the world.

Pop songs are the soundtrack of people's lives. More than just entertainment, they make direct emotional connections to listeners. Love and the loss of love, everyday and extraordinary experiences, joy and sorrow, life and death - good pop songs cover it all, and the best do it with melodies and rhythms so captivating that we experience them as "earworms" - music you can't get out of your head, and don't want to.

Canzoniere -Italian for "songbook"- the new album by the Italian band Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino (CGS), is full of songs like that, eleven original compositions and one traditional tune that marry the band's unique style to Western pop. The album's cover art, a photograph of a Coca Cola bottle filled with tomato sauce, is an apt visual representation of CGS' new music. As the band's leader Mauro Durante notes, the bottle "is a container - the Western pop song - but we put our own homemade sauce into that container. That's why the cover is a good metaphor for our process." (The cover and the album booklet design were created by the Italian company Casa a Mare).

Recorded in New York and Lecce, the band's home base, Canzoniere remains faithful to thepizzica style of Salento, the southern peninsula of Italy's Puglia region, that has made CGS an internationally acclaimed recording and touring band. "We are still using our typical instruments,tamburelli [frame drums], violins, bouzouki, organetto [button accordion], and bagpipes," says Durante. "We sing in Salentino dialect, we use our particular vocal, musical, and harmonic style, and our music is still driven by rhythm."But the album definitely represents a new chapter in their history. On Canzoniere, pizzica merges with club-ready dance numbers, South Asian flavors, soulful ballads, and anthemic pop. It's a stunning fusion of styles and influences that never loses sight of its roots.

The album's mix of sounds is, in fact, consistent with Salento tradition. That spectacularly beautiful part of southern Italy, at the crossroads of East and West, near both Greece and North Africa, has a multi-ethnic, multicultural history that is reflected in its music.

Canzoniere is the fruit of collaborations between CGS and U.S. and European songwriters and musicians. Beginning in late 2015, CGS leader Mauro Durante had songwriting sessions in New York with Michael Leonhart (Bruno Mars, Steely Dan, James Brown), Rasmus Bille Bahncke(Sting, CeCe Winans, Backstreet Boys), Scott Jacoby (Coldplay, John Legend, Vampire Weekend),Steve Skinner (Diana Ross, Celine Dion), and Joe Mardin (Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Whitney Houston). Mardin, son of the legendary Atlantic Records producer Arif Mardin, produced and mixed the album. The mastering engineer is Joe La Porta, a GRAMMY winner for David Bowie's final album, Blackstar.

Durante notes that none of these songwriters were familiar with the music of CGS. But once they heard it, "everyone loved it and wanted to try something with me. Meeting those people, and writing with them, has been one of the most challenging and exciting experiences of my life."

That the songwriters were eager to work with Durante, despite not having previously heard CGS' music, attests to the unique power and beauty of the band's sound.

Durante says that the songwriting process sometimes began with ideas he already had (the tracks"Ientu" and "Intra la Danza"); at other times it started from scratch ("La Ballata degli Specchi"). Durante wrote "Subbra Sutta" with Mardin and the Anglo-French singer and songwriter Piers Faccini, who collaborated with CGS on their 2013 album, Pizzica Indiavolata. Mardin joined Durante and CGS in Lecce, where they created the tracks "Tienime," "Sempre Cu Mie," "Pizzica De Sira," (the album's only traditional song) and "Aiora" (a new song written in traditional style by Durante and lead vocalist Alessia Tondo).

In Salento, pizzica originally was a ritual healing music, and healing psychic and emotional wounds, whether through love, social action, or dance, has been a recurring theme of CGS' lyrics. Canzoniere is no different. "Intra la Danza" (Into the Dance) is an exhortation to "together heal this illness"; "Lu Giustacofane" (The Mender) says "there is no wound that can't be healed." In "Quannu te Visciu" (When I See You), the narrator, whose "head is exploding" from the empty noise of so-called experts, finds respite in her lover's eyes.

Some of the band's longtime fans might be surprised by the big, anthemic choruses on tracks like "Moi" and "Lu Giustacofane." But as Durante points out, in writing those numbers he was inspired by the great tradition of Italian, and especially Neapolitan song, with its indelible melodies and choruses. "Wanna speak of anthemic choruses?" he says. "I'd say 'Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu.' Who doesn't want to sing along with that chorus, "Volare, oh oh"?"

Durante's mention of Dean Martin's 1950s smash pop hit "Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu (Volare)" and Neapolitan song is a reminder of the longstanding transatlantic connection between southern Italy and New York. When immigrants from Naples, Sicily, and CGS' Puglia region poured into New York during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they brought their music with them. The twenty-first century encounter between CGS and New York that produced Canzoniereis just the latest example of this fruitful mix of musical cultures.

Durante and his exceptional bandmates - vocalist and percussionist Giancarlo Paglialunga; bouzouki player, guitarist, and vocalist Emanuele Licci; multi-instrumentalist Giulio Bianco; diatonic accordionist Massimo Morabito, and vocalist Alessia Tondo - bring the new songs to vibrant, pulsing life. Silvia Perrone, whose beguiling dancing is a key element of CGS' live shows, contributes backing vocals. On Canzoniere, they are joined by guest artists Piers Faccini, cellist Marco Decimo, and British guitarist Justin Adams, from Robert Plant's Sensational Space Shifters.

Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino always has balanced the musical traditions of the Salento with their own contemporary sensibility. On Canzoniere, CGS has created a unique synthesis of homegrown and international sounds that will delight their longtime fans and should win them the broader audience they deserve.

"Canzoniere" - CD Track Listing:

1. Quannu Tu Visciu (When I See You) - [Durante/Mardin]
2. Ientu (Wind) - [Durante/Leonhardt/Tondo]
3. Lu Giustacofane (The Mender) - [Durante/Jacoby]
4. Con le Mie Mani (With My Hands) - [Durante/Skinner]
5. Tienime (Hold Me) - [Durante/Licci/Tondo]
6. Moi (Now) - [Durante/Bahncke]
7. Pizzica de Sira - [traditional, arr. Durante/Bianco]
8. Aiora (The Swing) - [Durante/Tondo]
9. Subbra Sutta (Up Down) - [Durante/Faccini/Mardin]
10. La Ballata degli Specchi (The Ballad of the Mirrors) - [Durante/Mardin]
11. Sempre cu Mie (Always with Me) - [Durante]
12. Intra la Danza (Into the Dance) - [Durante/Mardin]

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