Helmut Bürgel, artistic director of the Stimmen Voices festival in Lörrach (Germany) asked Jean-Claude Acquaviva to translate three texts from Pessoa into Corsican and to set them to music.

This new composition was presented at the festival in July 2009. The singers of A Filetta shared the stage with the musician Joana Aderi.

A Filetta and Kodo, a not so improbable meeting!

 In many ways, these two groups have had similar careers.

Kodo comes from Sado, an island in northern Japan, with a musical tradition of singing, playing and dancing.

From the songs of fishermen to subtle female dances and with a phenomenal mastery of percussion, this ensemble has, for three decades now, been enriching this deeply rooted tradition of eclectic creation which has provided so much monumental percussion, orchestrated notably by composers of contemporary music. This renewed tradition is now presented at the largest venues around the world!

A Filetta, a Corsican polyphonic ensemble, also had its beginnings in island vocal tradition and has opened itself to other genres (e.g. cinema, theatre and dance) and in 30 years has established a wide repertoire which explores new paths and new harmonies.

It is hoped that this promising creation will bring these two islands closer by combining their talents.

The planned event is to be restrained but strongly visual and will be set in space and movement by the Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui who has already worked with these two ensembles, providing superb, internationally acclaimed choreography!

In bringing together vocal traditions which seem so very opposed, by combining the complex harmonies of the one with the phenomenal percussion of the other, Cherkaoui will make bodies and voices dance. We can look forward to splendid new artistic effects!

 International release of the album, 24 january 2011, by ECM Records.

www.ecmrecords.com

www.mondomix.com

PAOLO FRESU (trumpet)

He began studying music and playing an instrument at the age of eleven, in the municipal orchestra of his home town, Berchidda.

In 1980, he discovered jazz and started playing professionally. Jazz has not let him go yet, nor he jazz!

Since then he has given concerts, recordings and master-classes as well as collaborating with other highly talented musicians: Gianluigi Trovesi, Rita Marcotulli, Antonello Salis, Flavio Boltro, Stefano Di Battista, Dado Moroni, Michel Portal, David Liebman, Daniel Humair, Toots Thielemans, Omar Sosa, Lee Konitz, Bojan Zulfikarpacic, Gerry Mulligan and John Abercrombie... the list goes on!

Awarded the prestigious Django d'Or in France, in 1986, he has since then remained at the top of the ratings, as best musician or for his recordings. According to Jazzman, he is one of the ten best musicians of the last ten years.

He has composed for the theatre, the cinema and for dance.

This multi-talented, eclectic musician has made a great number of recordings: more than 270 records and combined projects such as jazz and world music.

Very interested by and concerned with Sardinia, he is president of the cultural association Time in Jazz of Berchidda, which organises the Time in Jazz international festival as well as other cultural events.

 DANIELE DI BONAVENTURA (bandoneon)

This eclectic musician from Le Marche, Italy has a growing interest in improvised music, despite his training in classical music: from the age of eight, he has been studying the piano, the cello as well as composition and conducting an orchestra.

His musical collaborations are very broad, ranging from the classical to contemporary, from jazz to tango, from ethnic to world music, with incursions to the theatre, cinema and dance. He has played at the principal Italian and international festivals.

He has played with a host of diverse and well-known musicians: Paolo Fresu, Oliver Lake, Rita Marcotulli, Omar Sosa, Toots Tielemans, Enzo Favata, Aires Tango, les Tenores de Bitti, Miroslav Vitous, Luis Agudo, Elena Ledda and A Filetta.

 THE PROJECT

October 2006: their first meeting, at the Aghja (a concert hall in Ajaccio). Francis Aïqui was then the judicious go-between for a meeting between A Filetta and some jazz musicians.

From this meeting arose the wish to mount a real project with Paolo Fresu and Daniele di Bonaventura.

Four years have gone by since then; the famous jazz player and multi-talented musician, Paolo Fresu, the inspired bandoneon player and composer, Daniele Di Bonaventura and the Corsican polyphony group, A Filetta have enjoyed developing and maintaining a shared perception, and a real appreciation of this astonishing mixture. The constant exchanges since then have reinforced their links, defined their relationship and fed their musical imagination and their common expression.

O’ notte di i mei

Bocca senz’età

Hè dunque vera chì l’orma toia

In lu nostru fiatu si stà ?

                                                        Oh night of my people

                                                        Mouth without age

                                                        Is it true that your imprint

                                                        Lives on in our breath?

When the song evokes death, is it not actually celebrating life?

“What does not die does not live either” (Jankélévitch).

 The cult of the dead has always been important in Corsican tradition.

For more than thirty years now, many ensembles from the island have brought to public notice traditional requiems sung in polyphony (Rusiu, Sermanu, Ascu, Olmi cappella, Sartè, Calvi and more).

The group A Filetta has contributed, in its own way, to the safeguarding of the island oral heritage, particularly by incorporating new influences and their meetings with other artists - Sardinian, Greek and Georgian as well as their collaboration with Bruno Coulais have continually renewed the group’s personality.

These singers refuse to be the guardians of some cult to the past; instead, they cultivate, through their compositions, the idea of an extended tradition which is perpetually renewed and open. While the tradition is well-anchored in the memory, they do not hesitate to embrace and initiate new developments. A difficult exercise, no doubt, but one which is indispensable to their dream of remaining both enthusiastic and sincere.

Di Corsica riposu (Requiem for Two Visions) was commissioned for the Festival of Saint-Denis. It is a work for seven voices, narrator and bandoneon.

Danyel Waro lives in the heights of Saint-Paul with a view over the Indian Ocean. In his yard, he makes the instruments used in maloya music: the kayanm, a flat instrument made from cane flower stems and filled with wild saffron seeds, the bob, made from a cord stretched on a bow with a calabash as a sounding board, and the rouler, a large drum made from a barrel with a cow-hide stretched over it.

Danyel Waro, singer and poet, makes the Creole language dance to the limit of trance: “For me, maloya is, above all, the word. I seek the cadence, the image and the rhythm in the word. The maloya has put me back in harmony with Reunion Island, our language and our mongrel nature.”

 The sea on which the child will dream

[…] “listening to the flow of my drums

Waiting for the sudden shock of the waves

The awakening of the dancers on the water

And the dogs which from between one’s legs watch

In this noise of fraternity

The stone and its lichen my word

Exact but alive tomorrow for you

Such fury in the softness of the sea,

I make myself the sea where the child will dream.”

Edouard Glissant – taken from Un champ d’îles (A field of islands).

 In 2003, Danyel Waro was invited to the 15^th Rencontres de Chants Polyphoniques of Calvi. Beyond the music, beyond the voice, it was his word that moved us: island words, words of land and water, of freedom, anger and humanity. He exchanged this word with Jean Claude Acquaviva. Exchanged - what an ugly word! No bartering, however, between these two: just the fraternity that Edouard Glissant spoke of, and the desire to make their song “the sea on which the child will dream.”

Encounter with the singer Danyel Waro from Réunion at a residence in Calvi on the occasion of the 20^th Rencontres de Chants Polyphoniques and of 20 years of the festival Africolor.