Rino Arbore - The Roots Of Unity (2015)

The Roots of Unity is a project exploring the concept of unity, drawing inspiration from the iconographic "coincidence" of the grieving Madonna with an Arab woman in a burqa. These two images, magically combined with each other, represent a source of great interest and deep analysis: iconographic symmetry becomes a synergy and creative fusion of popular and cultural styles, a synesthetic fusion. The music of an improvisational nature, but with a decisive and careful "writing", comes from the ancient sounds of the ritual in order to evoke images referring to folk traditions, in order to show the existence of a language that, in diversity, leads back to unity, renewing the meaning of music as an expression of religious sociality, along the tops of primitive Puglia (with the influence of Arabic and Byzantine religiosity), to a tradition that is moving in the direction of new proposals and which is ideally associated with popular music, but tends to the future sound of incognito. The artistic adventure, composed of original compositions by Reno Arbore, is characterized by a "sound", meager and at times approximate, coexisting in an orchestra of guitar, drums and percussion, alto saxophone, tuba and serpentine; thanks to the precious contribution of sensitive musicians giving life to the project, a sound climate is achieved that begins with the anthropological tradition, through the use of modal scales and popular themes and applies to both chamber music and the avant-garde. The presence of Godard, a researcher of the interrelationships between jazz improvisation and ancient popular music, as well as orchestral music of a religious nature associated with Puglia, is significant...