Nìstanimèra - Chorè! - Tragudìa Greka tis Apulìa ce ti Calavrìa - CD Home Page | Newest Releases More music from Italy and Greece

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Nìstanimèra
Chorè! - Greek Songs from Calabria and Puglia
(Tragudìa Greka tis Apulìa ce ti Calavrìa) (Alfa, Italy)

Nìstanimèra's Chorè! presents Greek Songs from Calabria and Puglia, recorded as a live performance in the studio in one take, no fancy fixing. It is essential acoustic music of the region, played with high-energy.

Listen:
O Turco
Chorè!
Ela trekse
Evo e' mmuteo
Bedda

"Nistanimèra's repertoire ranges over the traditional song and dance tune styles of the region, with sources meticulously noted and documented in the extensive bilingual booklet. It's a major work of revived folklore, but with such energy and spirit that any thoughts of an academic nature that might come from seeing the package first, are blown out of the window. Villani sings right out there on the edge (think Arabic-tinged Jon Boden with all fingers crossed!) and the resulting combination of instruments and voice is just exhilarating." - Ian Anderson, fRoots

The musicians:

• Ettore Castagna: lyre, chitarra battente, malarruni (Jews' harp), frauta (an ephemeral harmonic instrument, devoid of finger-holes, made from bark), sulavrucia (double flute having two pipes of equal length).
• Piero Crucitti: button accordion, ninarelli (an empty shallow drum-frame with three lines of small metal rattles; often used by children), tambureddu (shallow-framed, opened-ended, goat-skin tambourine, with metal rattles, held in and moved by the weaker hand, beaten using the palm and fingers of the stronger one).
• Diego Pizzimenti: tambureddu, frischiettu e castagnara (ephemeral harmonic flutes) ciarameddi (bagpipes) voice, French guitar (modern metal-stringed, acoustic guitar).
• Valentino Santagàti: voice, chitarra battente, French guitar.
• Anna Cinzia Villani: voice, tambureddu, button accordion, mouth organ, seggia (low, wooden, straw-bottomed kitchen chair, used in the not too remote pregas-stove era to gain easy access to the fire while cooking).
• Special guests:
• Franca Guarnaccio: voice in "Per ligari li denti di lu lupu"
• Salvatore Gullace: mandolin in "Evo e 'mmuteo"
• Demetrio Dimitri Pizzimenti: tambureddu in "Ela Katu"

About the music (from the record label)

Chorè! is a live CD made in a recording studio. We preferred to record it all, all together. We feel it is better that way and that the listener is aware of it. Perhaps it’s not perfect but it’s human. We have kept post-recording additions to a minimum. All the lyrics are traditional. As to the music, to tell the truth, we do not know where the tradition ends and our compositions begin, because we are traditional musicians in mind and heart. However, following contemporary copyright custom, we have, against our better selves, labelled some titles “traditional”, others “by Nistanimera” .

Nistanimera, the group formed by Ettore Castagna, in Calabrian Greek means “night and day” and refers to the uninterrupted flow of time. It is a modality which permits the dream to enter the reality, a particular way of experiencing time as both joy and pain. The group comprises musicians from southern Calabria and the Salento, with various experiences in the fields of research and revival in these two cultural-geographical areas.

Byzantium, Nistanimèra and…
The Greco-Byzantine world underlies the tradition of two Italian regions: Puglia and Calabria. On the two remotest headlands of southern continental Italy (Aspromonte and Salento) minority Greek speaking communities survive to the present day. Calabrian and Apulian Greek are the sister tongues of neo-Greek and may be traced back to the earliest Hellenistic colonisations of these areas:a history of over two thousand eight hundred years of uninterrupted spoken Greek. During the Byzantine epoch the two areas were almost entirely Grecophone or, at least, enjoyed a condition of stable bilingual coexistence with various dialects of Romance origin. At the present day, in the two regions where the language has disappeared, countless traces of the idiom are still to be found: in dialects and place-names, in personal and family names, in popular religious practice and in the mentality of the people which the Greek world forged, bearing witness to a cultural vigour reaching beyond the shifting political borders of the Mediterranean states.

Where are the Italian Greeks?
In the past the Greek-speaking areas of Calabria were numerous. Today only the areas of Bova, Gallicianò di Condofuri and Roghudi, where the older members of the community recall and speak the language (sporadically), remain. As recently as a century ago the language was spoken up to the very gateway of Reggio Calabria (Cardeto) and tra-ces of it survived in Locride. The situation appears slightly better in Puglia where griko can still be heard in Sternatìa, Corigliano, Calimera Martano, Zollino, Castrignano. Here too, however, the confines of Grecìa are now far narrower than before. Emigration, flight from the region’s inland areas and socio-economic change have marginalized these age-old idioms.

The lyrics
Most of the lyrics contained in this CD are in Greek (Calabrian and Pugliese). We deemed it necessary to make a distinction between Aspromonte and Salento. For the latter we propose lyrics and melodies as collected “in the field” or drawn from ethnographic sources; to this regard we are truly grateful to Gianni de Santis from Sternatìa (LE) for his linguistic assistance and the explanations provided. The Calabrian repertoire proved more complicated to tackle. In this case, rather foolhardy perhaps, we set our selves the somewhat utopic task of bringing songs collected by XIX century folklorists and whose melodies were lost in the process, back to life. Rewriting melodic forms from the Greek-Calabrian area (in particular the area between the upper Sant’Agata valley, Aspromonte and Locride) we sought to give new life to nineteenth-century songs collected by Morosi and Comparetti which would, otherwise, remain “mute”. To this we have added our own compositional and orchestral endeavour, based on the modes and styles of the Aspromonte oral musical tradition.

The musical instruments
Despite a greater vivacity of the Salento compared to the Aspromonte area when it comes to the Greek vocal tradition, the griko world has very few musical instruments. In traditional Salento Greek culture cannot boast of instruments like the bagpipes, the lyre, the “chitarra battente”, the double flute etc.. Only the tambourine survives alongside other imported instruments like the button and piano accordion, the violin and the French guitar. The Calabrian panorama is richer in instruments. Typical and exclusive to the Calabrian Greek-speaking communities is the ciaramedda (bag-pipes) called a moderna “modern-style” (this ciaramedda may be heard in Ela katu). This is a hybrid between the a paru (equal-sized chanter) and key bag-pipes. Of the former it maintains substantially all the characteristics (an important element is the single reed whose tongue is cut bottom-up in the direction of the node) except for the left-hand chanter, clearly “inspired” by the key bag-pipe, which has a deeper register, one key and is almost twice the size of the right chanter. The a paru bagpipes are, however, widespread all over Sicily and southern Calabria. The lyre deserves a special mention. This kind of ancient Mediterranean violin, the forbear of the modern instrument, is of apparent Greek-Byzantine origin given the existence of practi-cally identical instruments in various corners of the Balkan and Anatolian areas. This instru-ment, once native to the Locride and (it is hypo-thesised) to part of the Gioia Tauro plane and the province of Vibo Valentia, probably arrived in Calabria thanks to the long-standing and conti-nuous contacts between the Greek and Byzanti-ne cultures of which this is the traditional bowed instrument par excellence.