The Best Album Award 2013 of the Jury of the National Award City of Loano for traditional Italian music was awarded to “Terra ca nun senti”, the album by Rita Botto and Banda di Avola. The reasons for this assignment have been expressed not only in reference to “technical” items, but more broadly cultural and music, framing the album in the work of the musicians, in their collaboration and, in general, in contemporary Sicily. As you read, in fact, in the press, “the expressive power and versatility of the voice of Rita Botto, freshness and vigor of the Banda di Avola and a repertoire that crosses Sicily as if it were – and to a large extent, as it is – Land of Music makes “Terra ca nun senti” an amazing experience, full of passion, study, spontaneity and poetry. Two important artistic entity in the history of the island, one of the popular song and banda, meet and blend together perfectly, proving, once again, that the real tradition is always on the go, it is always an encounter and dialogue and is always exciting discovery”.

The jury also awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award to Neapolitan actor and musician Peppe Barra. The reasons are as follows: “for having been able to interpret the song and the popular mood and fairy-tale of a city like Naples, placed in front of its problems and its artistic richness, never give up on a colorful and surreal vision, absolutely staff any topic or text staged and performed. Peppe Barra is not just a mask, but, for a time, once a great actor, a great singer, a great storyteller and a researcher in that area which is the tradition, not only of Naples. He managed to tie the wires that go from the Middle Ages to our contemporary age, with an extremely happy and contagious vein. A career that has made him a contemporary classic without this ever arrested evolving and insatiable curiosity”.

Finally, the prize Cultural Reality 2014 was awarded to Mauro Balma, researcher and scholar of popular music in Liguria, with the following motivation: “for his thirty years of meticulous work on a territory layered and complex as that of the Riviera and the Ligurian Apennines. A job that involved any form of documentation (paper, phonographic, audiovisual) to give the custodians of the oral culture of those areas a full voice, unmediated by third parties or by hearsay. In addition to this, the processing of the material that has collected over the years has allowed us to be able to trace an increasingly detailed and alive the musical traditions of our region and their facets, still in progress or in continuous revision”.

The Premio Città di Loano – under the artistic direction of John Vignola, journalist and radio host – is now in its tenth edition and its purpose is to promote and enhance the contemporary production of traditional Italian music. The initiative also has the merit of bringing together the professionals working in this sector through the involvement of many music journalists, who are called each year to be part of the jury. This year’s awards will be presented July 21 to 25, on the occasion of the festival Suoni della Tradizione.

Autore: Daniele Cestellini

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