Echoes from the boot-heel of Italy

Echoes from the boot-heel of Italy Aramiré revives old-world folk sounds at Zankel BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON www.newsday.com January 18, 2007 The photographs date back a generation or two, but the frenzied rituals they document emerge from distant centuries. It's summertime at the tip of Italy's impoverished boot-heel and a woman is splayed out on the ground, surrounded by placid villagers who wait for a rescue team of musicians. She is a tarantata, the victim of a spiritual poison that has thrown her into a trance. Brought on by a mythic spider bite or just by rural tradition, her fit can be cured by a visit to the church of San Paolo in Galatina on the saint's feast day of June 29 - that, and the intense administration of music. When the band arrives, she will start to writhe, still supine, creating her private choreography to a dance known as the pizzica. Eventually, she will rise to her feet. Her frenzy will increase, and though the music may go on for days, she will eventually return to consciousness and to the ordinary life of a peasant - at least, until the same time the following year. The phenomenon of tarantismo died out in the 1970s, and few in Italy's deep-southern area of Salento mourn it. Certainly not Roberto Raheli, who has made it his life's work to preserve and perpetuate the region's folk music, and whose ensemble Aramiré performs at Zankel Hall tomorrow night. The music, he explains, was linked to those quasi-epileptic episodes, but not limited by them. His repertoire is one of wedding dances and songs about labor, love and protest. The Salento of the 21st century bears little resemblance to the bleached, medieval land that nourished tarantismo. Today this southernmost part of the region of Puglia is known for its olive oil, its velvety wines, its farms spiffed up as tourist accommodations - and its infectious music. "La notte della taranta," an annual festival of folk and folk-tinged music in the town of Melpignano, draws 100,000 people. To Raheli, though, the Salento has been a victim of its own success, and the festival is an abomination. Uncontrolled development and environmental depredations go hand in hand with the pollution of the region's music, which is now most often peddled in the form of a pop pizzica and cotton-candy tarantellas. The tax money lavished on such spurious bacchanals would be better spent on research and preservation. "The old people have their own way of playing and singing, and that's been abandoned," Raheli says. "We're losing the music's richness." The 46-year-old singer, composer and musical archaeologist spent years gathering vintage recordings and scouring the countryside for octogenarian musicians. He invited himself into their kitchens for singing sessions and tried to acquire their slightly serrated harmonies and the timbre of their throaty hollering. He had to leap a barrier of decades during which this artisanal music had been set aside along with the hand-turned coffee roasters and wooden yokes. "I do remember the women singing in the fields when I was a child, but I'd be lying if I said that's where I learned this music," Raheli said. "I learned it later, and it took a lot of work." Raheli belongs to a generation of southern Italian musicians who have tried to recapture the culture of an agrarian past without harboring any nostalgia for its privations. The music he adores can be thistly and hard, like the earth his forebears plowed. Ernesto De'Martino, an anthropologist who arrived in Salento in the 1950s, declared the taranta a ritualized protest against the frustrations of peasant life. Raheli, who founded Aramiré in 1989, is something of a purist when it comes to the sounds and techniques of his homeland's folk music, but he is hardly an antiquarian. In "Mazzate pesanti" ("Heavy Blows"), the latest CD from Aramiré, the antique sounds of tambourine, accordion and raucous polyphony are put to the service of contemporary complaints: nuclear waste, poisonous fumes from coal-burning power plants, myopic politicians. "What's important is to take ownership of traditional techniques in order to compose new music," he says. "The old songs comment on the exploitation of peasants, they talk about social conditions. We want to honor that legacy but address our own time."