1. Dances: Fourth Movement 4:32 2. Scenes: second movement 4:46 3. Song a kalimba and a string instrument 8:43 4. etude sur le tubophone 1:55 $ 5. dances: introduction 1:56 6. los brujios 7:50 7. Dances: third movement 2:07 8. ostinato in blue 2:28 9. dances: fifth movement 2:37 10. buddhist monks priest song 2:42 11. Dances:first movement 3:25 12. the woodstock night 2:46 13. rattling for a vision 4:18 14. the woodstock day 1:20 15. forest 3:11 16. M.R. jazz 1:48 17. the impossible concert
Performed by:
Andrea Centazzo - percussion & electronics
About:
1980 saw the release of a project that illustrated the multiplicity of Andrea Centazzo's musical experience: compositional creativity, percussion virtuosity, study, research, and performance. This was Indian Tapes, a self-produced, three record box set of a substantial body of solo works surpassing all Centazzo's previous releases. This was not just improvised music but a selection of compositions and sound fragments recorded over the years - nurtured, developed and re - recorded over the prior seven years, the realization of a precise, clearly conceived sound project. Indian Tapes is not, as one might be led to think, an album inspired by the music of native Americans (which consists mostly of simple monadic and monorhythmic forms of expression) but an original work of art which pays homage to these peoples, to their philosophy of life, and to their relationship with nature.
It was on the banks of Lake Michigan in 1976, on seeing the monument to the Native Americans, the first inhabitants of those lands, that Centazzo decided to undertake his next impossible mission; to alone produce a work dedicated to the Native Americans. On his first U.S. tour in 1978, Centazzo visited the Indian reservations in search of a legend that had always fascinated him. "Ever since l was a small child, I hated John Wayne and the adventurers of the West-it always seemed that the Indians were the victims of one of the most devastating injustices in the history of mankind. As no adolescent I read all I could find on the subject, in order to get closer to the philosophy of that people". It was two years after his fateful visit before he could begin this extensive musical work-using all the audio-technical means at his disposal, re-discovering old recordings, re elaborating them, and composing new material. The preparation had actually begun in 1973, when al the outset of his musical career, Centazzo started experimenting in his home-built recording studio, using percussion and early electronic musical instruments. It had been a spontaneous project, without preconceptions, where random factors and artistic determination met and blended (with the help of reels and reels of tape) in experiments of all kinds. The resulting recordings were stored away to await fruition at a later date. For the first time, the texture of the music is enriched by noises and natural sounds, chants from other cultures, bird calls, crickets, frogs, in communion with sounds from their natural world and sounds created by the musician.
Armando Gentilucci wrote, "In Indian Tapes Centazzo appears to lay himself open to all the possibilities of the situation, accenting the anomaly of the percussion instruments, on their belonging to diverse musical cultures and territories. It is the wealth of instrumentation that leads us to different echoes, tackles the layers of ones memory, induces different images, yet despite all this there is a clear synthetic force and working cohesion. Therefore, we are not witnessing a mixture of musical genres in the sense of a collage, but the presentation of diversity, of heterogeneity. This imposing work, full of music that is technically strong, mysterious, pluralist, encompasses all the erective musical experience, ex-machine, avant-garde, jazz and more, that Centazzo has accumulated in a year of untiring activity." Indian Tapes was awarded the Italian Record Critics' prize for its "noteworthy artistic and publishing enterprise and its commitment to the furthering of research in the field of percussion.
Immediately thereafter the famous American publication, Downbeat gave Centazzo First Place in its poll for Best Solo Percussion Record, classifying him the Nino Rota of percussion. "With Indian Tapes, Centazzo enters into a wide open space, justifying this freedom with a series of truly noteworthy poetic creations, musical propositions, and technical solutions which give weighty validation to the 19 compositions. It seems as if Centazzo is principally an untiring researcher, if one can intend by this term a mentality which moves the musician to perceive and reorganize every type of sound event, to provoke emotions via artificial or natural means. On the three records the percussion instruments are mixed with voices, natural sounds, synthesized sounds, all captured by a manifestly attentive ear, which fuses these thousands of everyday impressions into a coherent argument. You can actually physically feel the close ties between the day to day life that Centazzo leads in his home studio and his travels around the world in search of new musical experiences; the link between the artist and the recording studio kept under his pillow at night. On listening to these records one has the sensation of making a long journey, going far off into abstract worlds, yet at the same time remaining in the company of our own innermost reality. Thus, we meet the 'Indians', in a fabulous and somewhat hallucinatory way. Yet the encounter is filtered by the patient and creative use of instrumental technique and recording equipment."
