AAVV
Circo Inferno Cabaret vol. 2 (Jaipur Kawa Band, Banda Ionica, Fanfara Tirana, Bollywood Brass )
Fy 8096
World Music
Dunya Records
Global Fusion
This second anthology album from "Santarcangelo dei Teatri's" music wing in co-production with Felmay records focuses on groups, styles and genres who find their raison d'être in the direct, almost physical contact they enjoy with their audience.
This is street music, not in the usual sense of busking for the crowd's entertainment but insofar as it is music that actually comes from the street and from the people who populate it, music whose communicative urgency has little to do with the demands of market forces. Here are artists who have no need of the massive stage, security cordon or plush changing rooms furbished with every imaginable luxury that are the usual trappings of musical stardom. On the contrary: for them the slightest obstacle between themselves and the public can only be negative. It's hard to imagine groups like Banda Ionica, La Fanfara di Tirana, Banda Improvvisa, I Corleone, the Etruria Criminale Banda or Frank London's Brass All Stars, the Earth Wheel Sky Band if not playing to packed out public squares or parading along the tortuous streets of some remote village of the Southern or Northern hemisphere lined by an excited, festive crowd basking in the warmth of sounds that come straight from the instruments themselves without need of any form of mediation whatsoever. A crowd that in every corner of the globe has unwittingly contributed to the creation of this music which is now, as it were "given back" to them, subverting all the laws of the global spectacle and bringing down barriers, especially cultural ones, everywhere: Rajasthan's Jaipur Kawa Brass Band, the female voices of B’net Houariyat or the Anglo-Indian Bollywood Brass Band provide much more than a bit of colourful exoticism. And the same goes for smaller ensembles like Tri Muzike, Acquaragia Drom or Terrakota whose multicultural approach has given us music that is alive and immediate, defiantly proud of its "low" origins. The vibrancy of these sounds is such that not even the speakers of a home stereo can tame them and is evidence enough that it's still possible, and perhaps now more necessary than ever, to make truly "popular" music. .