Berchidda, evening of August 14th. Paolo Fresu and Alessandro Baricco are on stage at Time in Jazz, at Sa Casara. Not just a musician and a writer: two men who explored music from different angles, intertwining their memories.
Alessandro Bergonzoni, who was absent at the last minute, was supposed to be there, but his replacement wasn't a stopgap at all. He was already in Berchidda, invited by Fresu, who reminded him that otherwise "it wouldn't have been easy to leave here." The invitation was accepted, with a knowing smile.
"Music encompasses everything," says the island artist, introducing Baricco. In his books, he recalls, there's always a rhythm, a sound that accompanies the words, almost as if they were written to be listened to as well as read. Baricco smiles and quotes Umberto Eco: "He always said: trust Wikipedia. But if it concerns you, you'll only find inaccuracies. I don't have a conservatory degree, nor am I a saxophonist, as it says. I've been playing the piano a little for years, and poorly. But I put music everywhere: it was my way of mourning the loss of that talent."
From that grief, who knows, a book was born, then a film: Novecento. A story of ghosts, of transatlantic love, of pianos dueling with the world. "Jazz," he explained, "was born from migration, from the encounter between Africa and New Orleans. Migrations have always generated wonders. Novecento was born that way, like a bit of jazz."
The conversation is sincere and nuanced. Fresu recalls his trumpet stored in a suitcase with the acrid smell of piston oil, his mother handing it to him after much longing, and him traveling across town so everyone could hear about it. The bands, the weddings that in Berchidda lasted a week, the concerts in neighboring towns, his discovery of jazz in the late 1970s. "For me, happiness was leaving home and going to the rehearsal room. My fortune was the band, a community that helps you grow. I learned there that music is about sharing."
Baricco offers another image, distant yet mirrored: the Turin of small clubs, sofas wrapped in cellophane, records listened to jealously in the halls. "I am the son of Turin's lower middle class. My father took me to a Rubinstein concert: it was my entry into an important world, the ruling class. My family was simple—my father a surveyor and my mother a stay-at-home mother—but different from working-class Turin. Life is about prolonging the flashes you see as a child. I tried to do that with the piano, even without becoming good at it. It's like loving a beautiful woman you date, but without ever sleeping with."
Thus, one, the son of a shepherd and the other of a surveyor, found two different ways to approach the same question: what is music? Fresu recalled Massimo Urbani, the son of a Roman janitor, and the first Italian jazz musicians, sons of the bourgeoisie who could afford records. He, on the other hand, would play Chet Baker at full volume in Berchidda and repeat it with the trumpet. "A musician is someone who breathes music, with or without sheet music. Chet Baker read terribly. Did Miles Davis know? Do we really care?"
Baricco adds another suggestion: "Let's not forget that it took centuries to arrive at musical notation. Guido d'Arezzo invented notation in the year 1000, transforming ut into do. Writing a concerto is work. When writing is no longer needed, it's because that music flies away, it doesn't last."
Complicit glances. Fresu quotes Duke Ellington: writing on one side, improvisation on the other. "I write a piece, but I want the melody to live through the thoughts of others." And Baricco, with a half-smile, recalls his musician friends who look at the charts without recognizing their names, with a hint of irony: "In books, you know why certain titles are there. In music, you don't. That's why many are lost. And sometimes you say: there they are, those aren't musicians. Even Pavarotti wasn't. But in the end, what really matters?"
The conversation doesn't follow a specific order: it's a melding of memories. Two distant stories that, for one evening, find themselves rooted in the same thing: music as destiny.
And when evening falls on Berchidda, amid the hills and silence of a town familiar with the power of the band and the wind, the words and the notes become one. A good white wine arrives on stage, and Fresu's trumpet, along with Baricco's lyrics, perhaps express the same desire: to prolong those "flashes"—as they've been called—that open up the world to you as children, and that as adults we try to cherish.
No longer a dialogue between a writer and a musician hosted by a Festival that each year finds new vigor and energy, but a unique story, made of weddings that last a week—Baricco recalled that his lasted fifteen minutes and took place in New York—and of concerts that change lives in an instant, of pianos and trumpets carried around the country.
The Berchidda audience listens delightedly, as if everything had already been written in the air: that music, after all, is a way of holding together memory and dream. And that when you don't know what it is—as Baricco reminds us in a quote he's proud of—then it's jazz.
