Luca Filastro Interview
Luca Filastro is 22 and he plays jazz as a profession. “I discovered it when I was five years old – tells the Calabrian pianist – listening to my father’s CDs. I began to love New Orleans’ jazz, the one of the beginnings”. With Sidney Bechet and his Maple leaf rag, it was love at first sight. Then, to grow up, every authentic love story needs perseverance, diligence and sacrifice too: “I began playing the piano and while, nowadays, many musicians start studying modern jazz, I passed through the history of jazz chronologically, starting from the rag time up to Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Bud Powell’s Forties and Fifties… Studying great performers too, like Nat King Cole who, as well as writing international hits, he was also an exceptional pianist”.
But at the piano his name, in the national jazz circuit and not only in it, is linked to the stride piano’s genre: “ It’s a music genre born in Harlem, New York’s Black neighborhood during the Twenties. It’s a kind of swing model, a music genre which arrives later with the blues’ contaminations. It’s not the only genre that I play but, since a few people are specialized in this kind of music style, the critics and the audience often connect me with stride”. Speed, virtuosity and improvisation: stride piano is complex and captivating. It gathers the swing and the blues’ paces and it follows the Afro-american tradition’s riffs, original jazz’s purest soul: “ The left hand – Filastro explains – beats the time alternating low-pitched sounds with chords, while the right hand extemporizes themes and author’s pieces playing them in this way”. The audience will appreciate him closely during the performance that the pianist from Catanzaro will do at the Cremona Jazz 2015 festival, on the evening of April 28th: “ I open Ron Carter’s concert” comments the young musician, almost moved to tears. “I’ve been to New York twice, and once I could see him during a live show: he’s a giant of the international jazz. When Carmelo Tartamella asked me to play forty minutes to open his concert I almost fainted”. He smiles: “He played with Miles Davis and with all the greatest of jazz, from Herbie Hancock to Sonny Rollins. He made the history of jazz music. Playing on the same stage is incredible. It will be a demanding trial for me: emotions play an important role in a soloist’s performance. But I’ll be ready”.
It’s also the “Giovanni Arvedi” concert hall that attracts the young jazz musicians’ exponent at the Cremona festival: “ I saw the pictures of the building, it’s wonderful. And the acoustics are said to be tremendous. I’m looking forward to enter it for the first rehearsals with a Fazioli grand piano; I’m waiting impatiently for putting my hands on it”. But the Calabrian talent’s appearance in Stradivari’s city, won’t be a fleeting one. In fact, Luca Filastro is already in the city: “I also heard about the “Jazz after the school bell” project that brings professional musicians in the schools. Involving young people is important. It’s important to bring the music in the schools, listen to it but also explain it. Unfortunately in the Italian culture there’s a lack of this type of attention. And a music genre as jazz runs the risk of being labeled as niche music, just because it isn’t popularized by the media. In New York – he comments with a sign of displeasure – I’ve seen twelve-years-old teenagers listening to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Here in Italy we don’t even know what a double-bass is”. That’s why he agreed with enthusiasm to take part on the whole in Carmelo Tartamella and ArchTop’s project, “proud of representing the young italian jazz players’ generation in an extraordinary program as the CremonaJazz one: for sure, I won’t miss a single show”.