CALEIDÒRKESTRA
La nostra Romagna

SHECDTD 011

885016005825
Sheherazade
Italia

 

Ninety years ago Romagna’s musicians started importing waltzes, polkas and mazurkas. They manipulated and revised them till they turned them into the “Liscio” dance. Following the steps of their predecessors, Caleidòrkestra takes the 'classics' of that repertoire melting them with new musical influences.

Caleidòrkestra's project 'La Nostra Romagna' (Our Romagna) saw the light of day in November 2010, but its origins date to much earlier.
Its roots go down to the very nature of Romagna people, their culture and their land: Romagna.
An old land, a border land, a land where everyone, from prehistory to our days, crossing it, took something, but also, and above all, left something.
The Gauls, the Etruscans, the Romans, the Veneti, the pilgrims who lived there, crossed it, populated it, bustling about, trading, fighting, left traces in the genes as well as in the local language, character, culture and, therefore, music, turning Romanga into a melting pot and Romagna people into skilled alchemists who can take different elements, styles and urges and create something new, unique and original, typically Romagnolo indeed.
Thus, as their ancestors did before them, Romagna’s musicians from the first half of the 1900s took imported waltzes, polkas and mazurkas, dances of Mitteleuropean origins, chewed on, manipulated, revised and shaped them till they made them their own and turn them into the “Liscio” folk dance.
The Liscio is a musical as well as social epic that lasted ninety years; it is a cultural phenomenon which, besides going through the life of at least four generations of Romagna people, thanks to tourism on the Riviera, was exported so successfully as to become, in the head of many, THE Romagna music par excellence.

Today, as many dance halls, the true worship places of Liscio, are disappearing, a new generation of musicians from Romagna starts to make their way into that history, rediscover that epic and, following the steps of their predecessors, takes the 'classics' of that repertoire to chew on and melt to music from other cultures, again, and create a new music, closer to their taste and their audience's taste, a new Romagna music.
The members of Caleidòrkestra committed all of their musical background, made up of jazz, folk, blues and contemporary music to the revival of a repertoire that only needs playing again, because music only lives if it is played.
Thus, it is not amazing if a Mazurka takes up a 'jazzy' shade or Romagna and Sangiovese take up a nostalgic feel, and La Gramadora makes you think of wheat fields that can be in Romagna as well as in Oklahoma; these are the shades and sounds of today's Romagna, which is increasingly multi-ethnic, but it as permeable as ever to new urges and ready, today as in the past, to take the best from elsewhere and make it its own, again and still peculiarly local.
Caleidòrkestra's journey is a journey into the world of Liscio, but also and above all into the philosophy of Romagna people and the music that best depicts them.
A tribute to any man from Romagna who gets excited when he hears the Passatore's (the Ferryman) name, who sighs over his girlfriend, who sings when he works, who is proud of his origins, both spurious and charmingly genuine, a tribute tha only a kaleidoscope of influences and styles, the echoes of a thousand places and a thousand spaces, of the one thousand Romagna dialects, could describe in his complexity.

Marco Bartolini

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