ROUND TRIP APULIA BALKANS

The duo with the extraordinary Greek-Ukrainian accordionist Eugenia Cherkazova was, therefore, an opportunity to make this round trip both geographically and temporally. In this way, I was able to experience my piano as a Romanian cymbalom, an instrument that I love so much, which combines my two loves: melody and percussion. I wrote and adapted some compositions, and then in 2018, this duo was born. The recordings are the result of three Apulian festivals: Wanda Landowska Festival in 2018, Euterpe Festival in 2018 and Talos Festival in 2019. I wish you a good listening and a good journey inside it!

In 1995 I was 13, and for the first time, I listened to 7/8 meter. It was the Along Came Jazz Festival in Tivoli, and the “Italian Instabile Orchestra” performed a special arrangement by Ergen Deda of the Bulgarian Petar Liondev. I was shocked. Since then, that sound has never left me. A hole had opened inside me, and not outside me. I experienced everything that I discovered about the Balkans in the years to come as something that belonged to me, that already resided within me, in my ancestral DNA. Apulia is divided, or united, from the Balkans by the Adriatic Sea. It is an area of ​​the Mediterranean that has been very connected over the centuries. Everything then comes back.

Livio Minafra