La straordinaria eredità del grande Tito Schipa: dal reggae alla pizzica, dal jazz al rock, dall’elettronica al cantautorato, la scena musicale salentina attinge dallThe extraordinary legacy of the great Tito Schipa: from reggae to pizzica, from jazz to rock, from electronic to singer-songwriter, the Salento music scene draws from tradition but is constantly open to the future, in the mainstream as well as the underground.
According to the ancient Greeks, the soul is like a lyre: it is enough to touch the right strings to create a melody and to move emotions and feelings. As infinite is the diversity among human beings, Just as the diversity between human beings is infinite, infinite will be the variety of melodies capable of touching them intimately: the so-called “tropes of the soul.”
This cathartic capacity is even emphasized by Schopenhauer, for whom music is a supremely collective art, capable of uniting people and cementing their bonds.
Music, therefore, is that product of human ingenuity that best manages to express the complexity of feelings, translating experiences, sufferings, emotions and hopes, both individual and collective, into notes.
When we talk about music inSalento, the mental association with pizzica and its wild dances comes naturally. But the soul of the people of Salento is a much more complex lyre and has developed over the centuries sounds of various kinds and origins, often expressing in music the same eclecticism that characterizes its culture that owes so much to the influence of the many peoples who have passed through it in its thousand-year history. “Simu salentini te lu munnu cittadini, radicati al messapi, cu li greci e bizantini” (“We are Salentini, citizens of the world, rooted in Messapians, Greeks and Byzantines”) sing the Sud Sound System in Le radici ca tieni (The roots you have), a song that has become an anthem of Salento, definitively characterizing it as a land with strong reggae overtones.
Since the late ‘80s, Sud Sound System has mixed Jamaican vibes with rhythms of local pizzica, becoming pioneers of Italian raggamuffin music sung in dialect. A resounding success that contributed to identifying Salento as “the Jamaica of Europe,” inspiring a large generation of local artists who further fueled that movement. The multiplication of rules and restrictions regulating the entertainment industry is progressively stifling a culture – that of sound systems, or the massive walls of self-built speakers that amplify the music at reggae nights – which has always made self-organization “from below” its strength and that does not always find a natural location in public spaces. Nonetheless, in Salento today there are still as many as 24 sound systems (on average one for every 60 thousand inhabitants approximately: consider, for example, that adding up all the regions of Italy’s Northwest there are a total of 21) that offer their performances in the underground music scene independently or as a unit, as was the case with the initiative known as “Salento Bass Conference.”
However, there are many tropes that tug the strings of Salento’s musical soul. And if some mainstream musicians come from the reggae context are in some way “children” of the Sud Sound System – such as Boomdabash and Aprés la Classe – many others come from different paths: Negramaro, Emma Marrone, Alessandra Amoroso and Dolcenera represent the tip of the iceberg of the rock, indie, pop and singer-songwriter spirit that can be found in this triangle of land between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea, which in summer becomes a coveted and hot stage. Squares, historic locations and discos fill up, and so many bands and disc-jockeys from the local scene, who create and produce tons of music in the winter, get a chance to be heard by an immense and worldwide audience in the summer months.
Alternative and avant-garde festivals such as “SEI – Sud Est Indipendente” in the 16th-century castle of Corigliano d’Otranto located just 15 minutes from Don Totu; club music that populates both rivieras with Malè, Guendalina, BluBay or Gibò on the Adriatic “East Coast” or Praya, Riobò, Quartiere Latino or Casablanca on the Ionian “West Coast”; all the way to pop music by the famous Al Bano Carrisi or Franco Simone, Salento does not disdain any kind of soundtrack, even the most cultured. The jazz scene, in fact, plays a prominent role in the musical culture of the area, which in the postwar period let the talent of exile Nicola Arigliano “slip through its fingers”. Since then, there have been plenty of venues that give space to jam sessions and jazz bands, brightening the evenings – and sometimes even the nights – of the many patrons in search of relaxation and quality instrumentalists.
An artistic richness that demonstrates how much Salento music is alive and in ferment and that probably owes its fertility to the one who, first of all, rose from this peninsula to stages all over the world: Tito Schipa, the Nightingale of Lecce. Born in Lecce in 1888, Schipa is considered one of the greatest tenors in the history of opera and is unanimously recognized as one of the characters who most brought prestige to this land. His voice, in fact, resonates every day at noon from the loudspeakers of central Piazza Sant’Oronzo in Lecce: like the tolling of a secular bell, the best-known arias from his vast repertoire are broadcast in homage to an artist who brought the name of Salento around the most important theaters on the planet, even going beyond the borders of the Cold War.
His legacy remains not only in titles such as the Conservatory of Lecce or the Theater of Gallipoli, but also in the musical legacy that still nourishes many contemporary artists in Salento, among whom we cannot fail to mention two multifaceted and committed composers such as Francesca Perrotta and Carolina Bubbico.
The Lecce-born Francesca Perrotta comes right from the Tito Schipa Conservatory and is the music director of Orchestra Olimpia, an all-female symphonic ensemble with which she works to promote gender professionalism together with the dissemination of works by women composers. She is the one who, at the specific invitation of the Quirinale, conducted the concert on the program for the “I concerti del Quirinale” festival after opening the inauguration ceremony of “Pesaro capitale della cultura italiana 2024” in the presence of the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella.
Carolina Bubbico, on the other hand, boasts the distinction of being in 2015 the youngest arranger and conductor ever to grace the stage of the Sanremo Festival, conducting Il Volo, which later won that edition. Born in Lecce in 1990, Bubbico is also a multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer focused on experimentation and the mixing of different musical genres and languages, from jazz to pop singing, a subject of which she is currently a teacher at the Tito Schipa Conservatory.
An extraordinary circle that closes and encompasses seemingly very distant musical worlds such as reggae and pizzica, opera and electronics, rock and jazz.
A lively scene that is a reflection of a kaleidoscopic culture and that does not turn its back on tradition but, on the contrary, continually seeks inspiration from it to enrich the most modern sounds and genres through ancient knowledge.
A music therefore proud of the past, which it tries to protect and spread, but also open to the future as has always been the attitude of a peninsula discovered on both sides and which, for better or for worse, conquers and is conquered.