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| This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #98 (February / March 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription. |
In 1954 and 1955, American folklorist Alan Lomax and Italian ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella went on a tour of Italy, undertaking what folklorists today call "shotgun collecting": they stormed into a region, stayed a week or two, and in that time recorded the best singers and instrumentalists they could find performing folk music. When their time in a region was up, they moved on to the next. In this way, they recorded hundreds of hours of tapes, which Rounder Records is now editing into the Italian Treasury series, a subset of the label's massive Alan Lomax Collection.
Italian culture was undergoing tremendous change in the post-war years, and in some ways Lomax and Carpitella were "just in time": Several of the genres of music and song that they recorded are now extinct. More importantly, they were sensitive to the changes going on around them without being strictly purist in their approach. Their healthy interest in Italy's past was supported by a genuine concern for Italy's present and future, and their sensitivity to their informants shines through Lomax's field notes and interviews from the period, as well as in the music they captured on tape.
The first volume in this series, Folk Music and Song of Italy: A Sampler [Rounder 11661-1801 (1999)], collects a very wide variety of music from the whole length and breadth of Italy. It contains material that varies from an irreverent song about Christ sung by one miner with a jew's harp to a gentle love song sung in harmony and polyrhythm by women at work in their fields; it contains love songs sung by an Albanian chorus and door-to-door Christmas caroling by a duet using a 16th-century guitar, or chitarra battente. There's also the essentially collaborative tradition of trallaleri represented by one song, and the essentially competitive tradition of stornelli, in which two singers try to outwit, one-up, and sometimes insult each other. Most interesting to me is a sea chantey from the tuna fleets of Calabria, in which the leader acknowledges the presence of the folklorists by adding the words "they've put us on a record" to his chantey. The disc also contains instrumental music from bagpipes, accordions, flutes, and brass band; most of this is dance music for tarantella or saltarello dancing. Most of the music is enjoyable, though perhaps not easily accessible to those who don't speak Italian. Still, it's a wonderful way for a neophyte to get acquainted with Italian traditional music. A note on the CD: Despite its title, this is not a sampler put together to introduce the Italian Treasury series. It is instead a reissue of a 1958 LP on the Tradition Records label. Because Lomax was more concerned with filling out a general sketch of folk music in Italy than with showcasing his own archive, this sampler includes material from other collectors, in regions where Lomax never worked. On the other hand, many of these tracks were collected by Lomax, and some of those also appear on other volumes in the series. Thus, read the track list carefully: if you do buy other volumes in the series it may or may not be worth your while to get this CD, too.
There are five more recordings discussed in this column from Dirty Linen #98 (Feb./Mar. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.
