Azul, the color of a story that happened in Brazil some years ago:

 

in a landfill in the city of Goiana, two men find what looks to them like a treasure in a tube. A blue powder that, if sprinkled on the skin, makes it shine in the dark, and for this reason magic. Children and adults play with dust and the neighborhood is celebrating. A few days later, a doctor discovers that it is cesium 137, a radioactive material. The "gift" had arrived, who knows how, from Europe. More than a hundred people remained contaminated and some died.

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This story and the play "La Pollera" by Gianluigi Gherzi, produced by Casa degli Alfieri, inspired by it, are the starting point of the musical project Azul by Mauro Buttafava.

 

"Mauro's music, many years later, fed on this story.

Thinking that one day the blue could return to being heaven and not radioactive brilliance."

G. Gherzi

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Azul is a unique musical tale made up of many styles, in which the richness of colors is given by the numerous musical instruments and their combinations, realized with different compositional methods. the album brings together different musical souls of the world: the improvisation and the rhythms of the South American music, already "mixed" form in which the African, indigenous and colonial roots are found, with European music from electronics to minimalist structures, from classical rigor to jazz improvisation.

 

A characteristic of this work is that of adapting the creative process and the techniques of realization of each piece to its narrative content, in order to achieve the greatest unity between language and the object of the story.

 

 

 

The encounter-clash between the North and the South of the world, which the deeply emblematic image of Azul reflects, is musically expressed by the combination of cello and berimbau, trumpet and bottles, flutes and drums, vocals and electronic bases, in a musical synthesis that runs through languages.