A musical storyteller – Antonio Forcione

The Rīgas Ritmi Festival has added to its concert program the outstanding Italian jazz guitarist Antonio Forcione, who will demonstrate his mastery and sense of style to festival guests on July 4 in the Riga Cathedral Garden.

 

Forcione is a multi-award-winning guitarist, composer and also a highly charismatic stage artist. At the Rīgas Ritmi Festival, the guitar master will offer a dynamic program of original jazz, whose stylistic influences can be found in Latin American and African music. Antonio takes guitar playing to a new level of artistic expression, and the many awards he has won in various parts of the world prove his geniusness. We chatted a little with Antonio on Zoom.

 

You are both a great recording artist and a charismatic stage artist. What attracts you more – studio work or concerts?

Thank you for the lovely words! I imagine myself much more as a live artist. I think it's an element of the unknown that attracts me and excites me at the same time. I believe that in any art form the most valuable thing is communication. Any art form has to communicate. And when you have that direct communication, it has a certain value. Now, I don't want to put down recording. Obviously recordings is important. You communicate in a different time. But immediate communication has a value which I reckon is very high, very important.

 

Especially in jazz music, when you can feel the audience and improvise?

Yes. What jazz music has more different from other kind of music disciplines is improvisation. The improvisation is more important. You are dealing with the unknown all the time, and there's an element of daring. When you dare about something, it's very important. It's also putting you up as an artist, up into limits. You want to know where are your boundaries, and you're always searching to break those boundaries. And I think it's very important for any human being to have that kind of rapport. But artists, they have it like an exercise, a daily exercise, and especially jazz musicians. But that doesn't mean that classical music, for example, doesn't have that element. They do have it, but classical music is much more intend to play the purest notes, the right note in the right place, that despite any time, will always be the right note in that place. It's got much more of a sense of longevity, I guess. But yes, I like improvising. In my music, there's improvisation. There's elements of improvisation, but elements of theme is very important as well. When I write, I care about improvisation as much as I care about the theme. When I compose, it's very important. Composing the right mood, the right melody, having the right vision for what I want to say.

 

What program can we expect from you at the Rīgas Ritmi Festival – will it be original jazz of various musical influences?

I happened to record about 20 albums of original music, there’s a lot to choose from. But in this occasion, I will probably choose some of more rhythm based compositions, especially from my album Sketches of Africa. Because what I do, being a musician, I have traveled all over the world and absorbed like a sponge everything around me. I stayed about a few months in Zimbabwe, and I stayed in South Africa before recording this album. I absorbed whatever's around me. Plus I've got African friends here in London. I'm playing with, like, Seckou Keita and also some Brazilians who absorbed a lot from Africa. Anyway I have this kind of element of putting into music my life experiences. So what you can expect is tunes from every album, but mainly concentrating on Sketches of Africa. And there will be Matheus Nova, who's been playing many years with me, that is incredibly talented bass player. He will be playing with acoustic bass and makes everything, even folk, to sound funky. It's kind of believable. And then Jansen Santana, who has been playing with me for last four years, is a fantastic, cool, groovy player. I’m very excited to be performing with them soon. By the way, I'm playing with them at Ronnie Scott’s very soon here in London, end of April.

 

Matheus and Jansen are both Brazilian musicians living in London, right?

Not only Brazilians, but they are Brazilians from Bahia. It’s the most African oriented, groovy part of Brazil. For me, it's very important, because when I was a kid, eleven, I was very keen on being a drummer. I never thought of being a guitar player because I wanted to be a drummer.

 

What happened?

What happened is a lovely man who was a shoemaker living under my flat didn't quite like the drumming. So he had a word with my father, and my father, after six months that this poor shoemaker was going crazy, came with a second hand guitar and said, try this, my son, and I started playing guitar. But my first influence about music, my attractions towards music, was far greater an attraction towards the rhythm. That's why I'm finding and always playing with African oriented or Cuban oriented, Brazilian oriented drummers and bass players.

 

But you come from Southern Italy, which has a very rich musical heritage. How has this influenced your work?

I think it influenced me a lot because I have two uncles, they played accordion, so I used to listen to folk music when I was at the age six, seven, there's a lot of folk music in the southern part of Italy. Some of the music are very rhythmically based, like a tarantella. And it did influenced me so much that I picked up mandolin at some stage. When I was 12, 13, I was playing mandolin, all these waltzes, old fashioned music. I think that already put me in a kind of a frame of mind of looking for the richness of the Earth, whatever we have in this world, and attracted me towards the roots of every country, of every folk kind of thing. I still have it now. That's why my dream is to do Sketches of Cuba next, Sketches of Brazil, Sketches of Turkey and maybe I’ll come to your folk music there in Latvia, because I believe in every corner of this Earth there's so much richness and we have too much mainstream.

 

Sure! We have a rich musical heritage as well. Maybe there's some influences for you too.

I'm sure there is!

 

Alright. You come from Southern Italy. Why did you decide to become a Londoner already in the mid-eighties? What did it bring to your musical career?

After finishing my art studies, I got a diploma in art. At 18, I moved to Rome to study jazz. I studied three years jazz in Rome, and I was literally studying from these American books. And there was a lovely book by Barney Kessel, a legendary guitar player. At the end of every exercise, every page, there was a little paragraph that were in English. I was so frustrated, because I could not read anything in English. And I could feel this was something that I had to deal in my life, learning English. I was playing and then some English people would talk to me and I could not speak and could not communicate. So I was at age 23 in 1983 and I decided I needed to go somewhere that I could speak English. And London was the first option, it was closer to Italy. I didn't want to go to the States. It was too far. And I came here with a guitar, an old bag, didn't know what to expect. I thought I was staying here for three months. And then I was involved in a kind of street entertainment. I was very young, and then I played with a mandolin, I played a song by Paco de Lucia, and I won a streets competition from BBC. Just two months later, I was already doing something, and I took that as a welcome. So I stayed here, and the rest is history. Then recording with Virgin Records. And then it started off all my recording process and all that, it's been an incredible journey, but I have a good sense of gratitude to what happened. I always wanted to be a musician. At the age of 16, I decided I wanted to make my living through music, and that's what I'm doing and that's what I did. That's kind of an odd story, because when I came to London, by 1987, four years later, I was already touring with Barney Kessel, with Bireli Lagrene, with Martin Taylor. So four years later, everything was happening to me. I had the chance to play with Barney Kessel, telling him the story, and everything was opening up for me.

 

Who else do you consider your main guitar heroes? You've been referred to as the “Hendrix of the acoustic guitar”!

Through times, obviously, the heroes change a bit. When I was a kid, when I started playing guitar, Jimi Hendrix was my first hero. Then Santana. He's been quite a big influence on my music because I felt he had the lyrical, melodic thing that Italian do like. And then the rhythm section was very Latin, so I could sense a beauty into that Latin rhythm with a melodic sense. Later on, when I was 16, a friend of mine was a hi-fi freak. You know, those guys that have all the vinyl at home. He liked my playing and invited me at home and he said, come and listen to this. And he's put an album by John McLaughlin My Goal’s Beyond. Incredible! I was so taken by this because I could not understand it very well, but I could sense there was something great about the feeling of that. And I followed John McLaughlin for years. Like my hero. I met him, I performed in a double bill in Corsica. But I think it did a lot to me in sense of vision, discipline, and what's more important, I appreciated his originality, I could sense all these elements that I try somehow to put in my music. I like to sense that I'm original. Whatever I do is something that I'm not imitating.

 

What does guitar means to you? Is it the closest relative?

Guitar is a beautiful channel for me. It's a great companion, and, yeah, it's probably a way that I expressing things that could never be expressed in words and in other ways that goes beyond it. I am very comfortable in any house with some guitars in there. Even when I go and visit a friend, I like a friend having a guitar somewhere. I've got friends that have restaurants in London. If they don't have a guitar on the wall, I tell them off. You must always have a guitar!

 

Which guitar companion is closer to you – a six-string or a twelve-string?

Definitely six strings is the one that I'm more at home. It's my comfort zone. But I do play twelve string. And actually I do love my fretless guitar. I have a beautiful fretless guitar because I do like that kind of Middle Eastern sounding. I went to do a workshop in Turkey and there's a lot of great fretless player. I'm actually playing with a fretless guitar player from Turkey called Cenk Erdogan now. We're having a great duo. I like to put myself into the danger zone. Because danger sometimes can bring the best in us.

 

That sounds like your next possible project or album.

Maybe, but now I've been to Cuba for four or five years, going up and down. I did a documentary about Cuba, talking about the troubadours. And now I'd like to go and close the circle with the Sketches of Cuba. That's my next project.

 

Sounds lika a lot of salsa!

Yeah, that's a dancing theme. But I want to do something more pleasurable for listening. With a kind of groove. Yes. 

 

Will there be some Cuban sketches in Riga concert as well?

Yeah, probably I will play something and I will tell a little story about my trip in Cuba. Because it was an amazing trip. I'd like to be a musical storyteller!