Achille Succi - Gargano Urbano (Contemporary Jazz from Rural Singing to Hip-Hop) (2020)

What remains of a people’s musical idiom if the world undergoes epochal changes such as war, emigration, transition from rural to urban society? Traditional repertoires in turn are transformed, sometimes they risk to be lost.
Musicologist Alan Lomax in his trip to Italy in 1954 had well grasped this aspect, thanks to his pioneering activity of recording, cataloging and researching we can have extraordinary documents, testimonies of a society in some ways far from ours, but still rooted in the lives of our grandparents, in the lands, and in the stones of the Gargano and Lucania towns.
On the other hand, in all folk music, as well as in those coming from the Lucan area, there is a primordial fire that passes from generation to generation: each melody draws from the previous one to reappear innovated from the inside, thanks to continuous reworkings of the sound material, sometimes imperceptible, other times macroscopic.
It would be a mistake to reproduce the same songs slavishly, in the same way, the result would be a museum music that has nothing to do with the preservation of the original fire; it would rather be worshiping its ashes, citing Gustav Mahler’s aphorism.
This is the key to understanding Achille Succi’s original “Gargano-Urbano” project, which tries to interpret the fire of the region’s music in an “urban” way, with a look at the current, syncretic and inclusive sound universe, open to the world.