Strong hands: we'll tell you about Syria... with music

From 21.15 to 21.45. How can music and arts have a key role in the challenges of our age? Which role has beauty in our complex world scenario? Media and social media are nowadays permeated with bad news, catastrophes, wars, and less space is left to beauty. It Is not a matter of forgetting or hushing up what is going on, it is more a matter of giving hope by spreading beauty which is a precious seed underneath ruins and mud. This is the challenge for AlphaArt.org, a platform founded by Isaac de Martin and Alaa Arsheed in 2015 whose aim is to support social, human and cultural initiatives to help those whose lives have been ripped from under them. Past experiences, present projects and future plans in conversation with Francesca Paci, Alaa Arsheed and Isaac de Martin. With simultaneous translation.

To be followed at 21.45 by the concert Strong Hands.

Alaa Arsheed published his first album Sham (produced by Fabrica) in December 2015, and is now working together with producer Isaac de Martin on his second, Portrait, to be released in October 2017. Here is the opportunity to listen to Sham online.

During the recording sessions of Sham (July 2015), Alaa Arhseed met Isaac de Martin, founder of the Adovabadàn Jazz Band, a solid and historical group which disseminates hot jazz and swing all around Italy and Europe, very attentive to commixtures and sensitive to dialogue (ancestral prerogative of good music), where music allows them to communicate and tell good stories, the stories coming from far away.

The band, over some months, arranged the repertoire of Sham to create a live, purely acoustic version, where pastel brush strokes of banjo depict the backdrop to the warm melodies of Alaa’s violin in a dialogue with Uliana’s refined clarinet, while the guitar in the hands of De Martin draws arabesques, and a solid rhythm section led by Barbon and Straforini wraps up this picturesque trip to the Mediterranean.

During the reharsals of the Jazz Band, Endi (a hip-hop singer from Northern Italy, and a longtime friend of the Adovabadàn Jazz Band) visited the six and, while listening to Alaa’s story and to his dream of reopening the Alpha Gallery in Italy, wrote in one go the songs narrating the adventures of our violinist and his strong hands (preview here).

Adovabadàn (which in the dialect of Bari means ‘don’t worry, take it easy...’) becomes the ideal place to practice dialogue, exchange, and the search for beauty by 7 musicians and the fabulous guests who regularly make visits.

The discography of Alaa Arheed with the Adovabadàn Jazz Band and Endi Primo MC is scheduled for release in May 2017.

These men met in their artistic and life paths through the music of the Adovabadàn Jazz Band, which together with Endi’s words retrace the life of Alaa, a Syrian violinist, in a sound painting somewhere between reality and fantasy, between war and peace, between integration and isolation, between love and hate.