Elsa Martin - Sfueâi (2019)

Music has always been one of the greatest influences in Neal's life. He was a powerful man and his future teenage years. It was playing guitar, singing, or writing, in some shape or form, music would always find it's way back into his life. With influences such as Dave Van Ronk, Townes Van Zandt, to Jason Isbell, and Ryan Adams, Neal's songwriting remains focused on telling the condition of the soul. With his heart on his sleeve with every performance, Neal believes that the best songs stem from honesty.

First of the two events of the Musicus Concentus made in collaboration with Metastasio Jazz, this singular Sfueâi, a project by pianist Stefano Battaglia and singer Elsa Martin, fully responded to the theme of the Prato festival, "Languages ​​beyond the borders," presenting poems of poets from Friuli mostly in the original dialect, on original music.

The poetic texts, reproduced in translation on a video when sung in dialect, came from authors such as Amedeo Giacomini, Pierluigi Cappello, Novella Cantarutti, Luciano Morandini, Federico Tavon, and almost always were of amazing simplicity and immediacy, thanks to being often lyrics for children. The music, on the other hand, was complex and meditative, suspended and evocative, consistent with the paths usually beaten by the Milanese pianist, but which, merging with the voice and the very special texts, ended up leaning on even more unusual territories.

If Battaglia has in fact developed elaborate harmonic and sound explorations, often moving also in solos, Martin has sung, but has also supported the atmospheres created by the pianist with vocalizations, noises, sighs, without however ever going towards excessive virtuosity or "special effects" "-in this respecting the simplicity of the texts. Such a park use of tones and expressiveness, in accordance with the intimate atmosphere that pervaded the whole performance, then stood out at the end, during the encore: a traditional Armenian song, one piece not taken from the material developed by the two for this project, in which Martin was able to show another face of her vocal qualities, interpreting it with great power and sense of drama.

The proposal, which is part of a large project that collects other material including also poems by Pierpaolo Pasolini, has appeared on the whole virtuously ineticable, straddling contemporary, folk and jazz; wonderfully interpreted, he transported the spectators into a magical reality, now melancholic, now sweet, always fascinating and suggestive. We hope for a short disk documentation, on which the artists are already working.