Avezzano in Blues
Trip Start
Jun 15, 2007
1
4
25
Trip End
Sep 05, 2007
Avezzano,
Abruzzo,
Italy
Friday, June 22, 2007
(Avezzano, Saturday, June 22, 2007)-Leaving Forte Prenestino early Friday morning after a short night's sleep, Mark & I meet up with Willie King and the fellas at their hotel and climb into Tony Negri's 9-passenger van for the three-hour drive up into the mountains of Abruzzi and the little town of Avezzano for our second Italian blues festival appearance. Upon arrival we check into the very fine Hotel Salviano on the outskirts of town, catch a welcome nap and then motor into town for the sound check.
Avezzano in Blues is staged in the town square for an attentive and enthusiastic audience of townspeople and visitors from the countryside who look to be ready for just about anything that might happen onstage. Mark and I have the honor of opening the show and manage to win the crowd over with our rhythms & blues despite their nearly utter incomprehension of the American language in which my poems are written. They're with us all the way in any case, and we leave the stage elated with our performance and their response.
Willie King & The Liberators present a set of raw, unadorned electric blues from the northwestern Alabama countryside that resonates throughout the assembled Italian listeners and touches their emotional core in a clear demonstration of the universal message of this music and the way it speaks to the human condition. The Liberators are followed by an energetic though basically generic "blues band" of the Italian persuasion; as the crowd begins to slip away into the night a high point is reached on the stage when Willie King comes back out to do a couple of numbers with the local cats with ultimate grace and charm, bestowing upon them a wonderful gift of total authenticity to reward them for their careful study of the musical idiom created by African Americans and now shared by all.
The next morning Mark and I will part ways with Willie King and the band-they'll drive north to Parma and meet up with my homies from north Mississippi in the band called Afrissippi, and Mark and I will be picked up at the hotel and driven to Umbria for our Saturday night show at Blues Sunset in Citta di Castello. Before brother Luigi collects us we locate the splendid Ristorante Napoleone just down the road and treat ourselves to a sumptuous bruncheon. Then it's about three hours of eye-popping scenery on Hwy 45 and we're slipping into the sleepy little City of Castles and winding our way into the town square for the festival.
-Detroit
August 2, 2007
