“If movies are spaghetti westerns, my album is a spaghetti southern. Spaghetti Southern tells about my south and maybe yours too, because the south belongs to everyone. The south of the heart, the south of basil and tomatoes, of stereotypical clichés, of the infinite sea, of gritting your teeth. The south of loving each other, of necessary women and of giving each other a hand. All these things in my opinion are the best Italy, the one you see in moments of extreme difficulty, the one just a step away from the point of no return. Here in the south all this is everyday life, so I would advise everyone to start from the south, also because starting from the bottom you can do nothing but go up”.
For his fourth album, the one he considers the most important of his artistic career, Riccardo Ceres points south. To his South, to the south of every listener, to the truth of a south that fights against stereotypes, to the south in an allegorical sense, the ideal starting point towards the top. Spaghetti Southern is the perfect compendium of a significant story, that of an eclectic and unpredictable “pulp singer-songwriter” – as he has been defined by the press – active since 1999, who has also discovered himself as a prolific composer for the cinema. Spaghetti Southern is a work of considerable maturation, in which Ceres' musical stories find a perfect synthesis between blues, jazz, roots, psychedelia, rock and singer-songwriter: “When I write songs I imagine a story, when I write stories I do it while listening to music, usually the same song, usually old school jazz, Coltrane/Davis and their blues. To put it simply, “I make my own films” with my music and my scripts, my films”.
Devoted to Piero Ciampi, Paolo Conte and Tom Waits, to the golden age of jazz and blues, to the Beat Generation, since his first album Puro Stile Italiano (2001) Riccardo Ceres has sought his own musical and literary style. In 2009 with his second LP Riccardo Ceres in James Kunisada Carpante and in 2012 with E il mondo non c'è più he got closer to a goal that he finally achieved with Spaghetti Southern: a meeting between artistic and individual, historical and private motivations, ten songs around the mysterious guideline of the blues. The blues is a choice, but also an inevitable path for Ceres, who feels, thinks, writes and lives this music as a confession, a ritual: "I believe that the blues is the best soundtrack to tell about yourself. They are "only" three chords, the essential ones to tell and to tell. In various forms it can be found in all the souths of the world. For me it is a sort of religious ceremony. In all the cultures of the southern hemisphere, the most orthodox religions are dotted with pagan rites. Especially in rural areas, the music of these ceremonies is composed of the same harmonic cycle that is repeated over and over again, until exhaustion. To reach mystical ecstasy, to feel and see what one cannot feel and see in real life. To breathe to the rhythm of the breath of the world”.
Riccardo Ceres is in excellent company, having performed the notes of Spaghetti Southern with a group of excellent musicians such as Fabio Tommasone (Rhodes piano, Hammond), Raffaele Natale (drums), Vincenzo Lamagna (double bass), Ciro Riccardi (trumpet, flugelhorn), Andrea Russo (accordion), Artan Tauzi (cello) and Rebecca Dos Santos (percussion), with the trusty presence of Giuseppe Polito in the studio and the production of Bruno Savino for SoundFly, with an excellent result also from the point of view of sound research.
Article published on 29 October 2018 - 10:43
