Joe Petrosino introduces himself to the audience as a novel story-teller. For sure he’s not the one and the first, and the appearance of the music reporter on behalf of “the lonely and the outcast mankind” doesn’t reward him at the first glance. But it doesn’t look like Joe Petrosino, by means of Rockammorra and his other ever-growing musical projects, aims at gaining some kind of acknowledgement of the publishing musical industry establishment by which they celebrate themselves and their well-known promotional mechanisms.
So what does it all look like? What’s it all really about? Let’s try discovering that.
Well, listening to Joe Petrosino and Rockammorra it goes figuring out the idea of seeing them in the middle of a street crossroad while they’re trying to stop and catch the attention of thousand people casually passing by just with the strength of their music formula and artistic project, and all that people is suddenly attracted like moths going mad around them, along with their thoughts of escape from the slavery of the modern times.
Joe, you play “Suonami il mondo” (“Play me the world”, ndt) to people passing by and tell them “please let me see/how many sound I can hear/play me the wind of war and peace/keep me the time just with your voice”.
The nobility of your intentions is “out of the rules” of men and women of 2011 that should be to you the strings, the winds, or the drums of the big orchestra living this world.
And it is “out of the rules” because the urban rhythms are played by other drums, by orchestral sound like anomalous waves that suddenly and unconsciously crushes on our lives.
Many dances with your Jamaican-inspired rhythms, mixed to the pain of the suburban life, they reach us full of promises for a night of party and celebration, to restore themselves in a Saturday night from the fatigues of the past week.
All this people “wears” your music, your hope, the one of Joe and of the brave musicians playing with him, in order to light the fire of the Concert out of the stage to the audience.
Joe, I am speaking right to you because my job is not the musician, and so I “listen” to you, and I’m by your side as a musician, an author, a
composer, I understand the satisfaction and the frustration felt by who is not putting down some verses just to please music producers (are there still some of them?) or a “superstar” journalist o whoever else. And I understand that, despite of all this appearance resulting in the world (and now we have the answers to the before mentioned questions) what reaches the heart of people in the Big World is a minimum part of all.
Joe, it’s up to the Poet to harmonize the Soul of the Mankind with the foreseeing ability that the real musician have as a gift. We need to encourage the resistance of the man of the street, and keep the memory of the past in the sign of the present.
Joe Petrosino and Rockammorra passionately represent the historical music roots of our land: the
Tradition of the “paranze” in Pagani, the cults of the folk festival hung in balance between laical delirium and religious devotion, the erotic soul of the dance and sound of the tammorra, the message of energy given by rock music, plunged in a polyrhythmic groove, with rhymes remembering rap music.
This was just a premise. Now it’s up to Joe
Petrosino and his Rockammorra band to go on stage for you and with you!