A new tradition has been established in Ferrara lately.  Every year we celebrate the new summer with a city-wide night party thrown on the solstice day.  In yesterday’s edition I attended a wonderful fireworks show where music and light synchronized together built a moving synesthetic show.  Fireworks went on for about 45 minutes, with a sequence of several songs, each one with a different choreography.

Meanwhile, every corner in the city center had some entertaining event to offer: museums exceptionally opened till late, theater and live art performances, open air mega-screens running movies and the football match of the European championship, several concerts of all sorts of music, free salame with ciupeta bread, card games tournaments and more.  The city center was packed till at least 2am.

After the fireworks we’ve attended a theater show by Teatro Comunitario Pontelagoscuro, a grass-root show created by the citizens of Pontelagoscuro and the help of Teatro Nucleo, talking about the dramatic history of that place in the 20th Century.  It impressive how professional is the result achieved by the will of a few dozen normal people getting together to act in their spare time.

Yesterday I went to see Miró: la terra, an exposition dedicated to the Catalan artist held at Palazzo dei Diamanti. This was my second attempt with Miró. The first was many years ago – I was still in primary school – the teacher brought us to the exposition and tried hard to make us understand what’s behind the surface of such apparently simple and meaningless sketches. That time she failed. Luckily enough, now I’m grown up. After so many years, watching Miró’s painting had a totally different effect on me and, even if I know little about art.  At least this time I could appreciate the message conveyed.

The exposition is laid out in a way that allows you to follow the artist’s mental path while he mutated style and obsessions along his life. It goes from the usual detailed description down to the totally surreal, purely symbolic, conceptual, two-dimensional, synthetic and ironic deconstruction of both reality and painted art itself.

Most paintings are a little cryptic and require you to stare at them a few minutes before you begin to recognize all the symbols and why different materials were used to build that meaning. Look at this one, “Catalan landscape: the hunter” (from MoMA New York), painted in 1923-24 when the artist was in the early stages of his career. We see a rural landscape, with yellow sunny sky and unshaped land. That triangle on the upper left is the head of a man, with one eye, one ear, a strange hat (the traditional Catalan barretina), mustaches, beard, a pipe. His body is a vertical thin line ending in a squared thin line for his legs. Arms are rendered by a wavy horizontal. In his right hand is has a prey and in the left a smoking rifle. In the bottom part a big fish (a sardine, says the paint) is partly morphed in a lizard and tries to capture a fly with a long tongue.

Note how the artist hints us at the meaning behind symbols, using a surprisingly low number of carefully selected signs. That big eye, partly hidden behind what could be a tree with one single leaf, is looking at us. Is that Miró himself, amused by the feelings this painting generated in the watcher?

A mere few months after I’ve enjoyed The Final Four at the Birdland in Manhattan, yesterday I’ve had the opportunity to listen again to one of the most important jazz players and composers worldwide, this time at the Jazz Club (A.K.A. Il torrione) in Ferrara. Steve Kuhn played in a trio, together with Billy Drummond (drum) and David Finck (bass).

Kuhn, 68, is considered one the living giants of piano jazz. In his career he made several recordings and worked with Kenny Dorham, Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Art Farmer and John Coltrane. Finck worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Aretha Franklin, Sinead O’Connor, Natalie Cole, Rod Stewart, Herbie Hancock, Al Jarreau and George Michael. Drummond worked with Sonny Rollins, Pat Metheny and many others. All in all, this can be well considered a world class trio.

Their energetic and yet personal interpretation of some jazz standards together with the amazing setting of a medieval bastion made an outstanding concert. At the beginning they didn’t find the right way to blend together, but then the more they played the more they felt as one, building a balanced dialog among instruments and a yielding more fun at every song.  Kuhn caressed the keyboard with elegant touch and logical digressions, Drummond beat the drums like an unstoppable syncope machine while Finck glued everything together using different timbers and techniques (pizzicato, bow).

I love concerts at torrione: it’s an awesome place for this kind of music. I mean, it’s not as famous as the Birdland, but the room is inside an original bastion, part of the historic city walls, and has a wonderful acoustics and a fuzzy warm feeling. The guys who run that place are great and brought to Ferrara a number of high caliber international stars. In the last few years, among many many others they got Steve Grossman, Lou Donaldson, Ray Mantilla, Irio De Paula, George Cables, Jim Snidero, Red Holloway and Al Foster.

Local public is very warm but not always makes the concert sold-out as the greatness of the names who are on schedule would deserve. For example at the Birdland I had to go through a 40 minutes line before getting in despite the Final Four being on schedule twice per night for a full week, but yesterday night there were several free seats at torrione. Oh well, they don’t realize what they lost.

This was taken last September at the Ferrara Balloons Festival.  There were many huge balloons, some of them with crazy shapes.  You could even buy a ticket to ride one.  An interesting thing: I discovered balloons are better flown in the morning or in late afternoon, apparently because the hottest and coldest hours make navigation harder.

This week Ferrara celebrates the 20th Buskers Festival. For seven days straight, every night the medieval town center will be invaded by a few hundred street performers coming from all over the world and playing the most amazing instruments and music styles. It’s like the whole town became a giant stage 50 acres wide, surrounded by monuments and typical shops and shared by many parallel concerts. If all those performances were to be executed one after the other, they would continue uninterrupted for over 100 days.

I’m lucky enough to be currently on vacation, so in past few days I have walked the city center several times. Walking through the massive crowd is usually exhausting, not to mention finding a good spot where you can actually see artists in addition to hear them, but since this week the weather has been so-so, there was less people than normal and this helped. The problem is there’s so much to see that I’m completely overwhelmed. I’d like to give attention to many more artists but you either stop listening something or you wander all night without actually listening anything, which is what I want to avoid.

Among the many artists that I have appreciated so far, the most impressive are Gabriel Delta and the Hurricanes from Argentina (latin blues, swing, r&b with Stevie Ray Vaughan influx), The Fellowship of the Strings from Australia (celtic folk, sort of Loreena McKennit meets Abba), Erika Biavati & the Clan from Italy (blues, Mina and more great female voices), Lou-d Cage from Italy (percussions, including improbable home-made instruments and experimental stuff, very funny), The Moonlovers from Belgium (rockabilly), Gitárduál from Hungary (classical music with two acoustic guitars).

See Fabio’s photo gallery for more beautiful pictures.

This wine has a very structured bouquet. At first you can feel a strong smell of minerals, paint, sage. Wait a while and you will see hints of asphalt and some black berry emerge from behind. Wait some more and it will turn in caramel and the hay. Wait even more and it will finally turn into tobacco. Taste is a little bitter, strong, with good balance between acidity and tannin and a sapid tail. Surprisingly, it disappears relatively quickly. Refreshing.

]]> http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/12/11/baba-fortana-mattarelli/feed/ 0 http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/09/23/94/ http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/09/23/94/#comments Sat, 23 Sep 2006 14:35:57 +0000 simone http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/09/23/94/ Federico Aldrovandi was an 18 years old guy from the same town where I was born. One year ago, the early morning of Sep 24th, Federico died in the hands of the police. They initially tried to hide what happened and the body was left alone 5 hours dead on the ground while his mother was looking for him. Then, their version has been that he collapsed by drug overdose when they tried to arrest him.

Pictures and independent analysis show that he he was beaten hard with a wound ruptured on his head, violet colored stripes on his pulses of the handcuffs, his scrotum smashed, lots of blood under his body. This story was almost unknown outside of the town, until Federico’s mother opened a blog. That eventually brought the case to national attention.

After one year, the truth still struggles to emerge as no trial in court took place yet but, no matter what really happened, we must make sure people won’t forget Federico’s story. I know, this post is mostly useless and won’t change anything, but then again…