Productions

PINTURAS

Roberto Ottaviano: soprano & alto sax
Nando Di Modugno: acoustic and electric guitar
Giorgio Vendola: double bass
Pippo D’Ambrosio: percussion
and
Médéric Collignon: cornet, flugelhorn, vocals, electronic music

There is an old Italian saying that like chickens coming home to roost, all knots are snagged by the comb: knots to be unravelled, that keep entire generations bound to cultural fetishes that light their way; tying the knot as a metaphor for making a pact, for the promise of a goal to be reached.
Pinturas encounters one of the most interesting French musical personalities of the nouvelle vague, Médéric Collignon, and a new knot is tied.
Over these years, Pinturas has shown solid programming and has affirmed a strong identity-based design in search of the world’s music, between rhythmic articulations and a melodic charm capable of evoking the ancient while projecting itself into the future. Through this alliance, this sharing, the band has led an original sound to represent the land where it lives and works, Puglia – without cherishing forms of formal beauty, the clichés characteristic of Southern Italy – and to grasp the sense of modernity, albeit in the awareness of belonging.
Collignon, as much in his own projects as in his collaborations with Portal and Sclavis, has generated a lucid madness of instruments and interpretation, thus gathering the finest fruits of courage and transgression typical of French culture, and fully earning the label of énfant terrible.
And thus these two paths meet, to form an association and at the same time to dissolve a withheld reserve, each in his own setting – an age-old love upon which a part of the foundations of their mutual personalities is based: the power of 1970s’ rock music.
Collignon has lately paid homage to the musical universe of King Crimson, with an ensemble that includes an entire string section. But Ottaviano, who wrote the music for this original project, does not intend merely to replay or, even less, to provide new arrangements for pieces linked to that extraordinary and creative musical era.
The idea of NOEUDS – NODI on the other hand is to recover the power of impact and the occasionally “barbaric” strength of that atmosphere, all its expressive urgency, that today appears somewhat dispersed in favour of a music that is excessively vapid, tranquilizing, and light. The front line’s brass counterpoints are constantly supported and ornamented by Di Modugno’s guitars, while the rhythms of Vendola’s double bass and D’Ambrosio’s percussion uninterruptedly pump an idea of groove that can embrace infinite settings. It all makes for what Charles Mingus would have called a “Fight Song.”