root salad Lou Dalfin
The south of Italy has gained much attention lately, but don’t ignore the north. Christopher Conder drops in.
I
t’s the hurdy-gurdy that gives it away. Every so often my shuffling music player offers up a tune I struggle to identify. One of the tracks might sound like an English ceilidh band, another is a dubby Balkan banger, a third some jazzy hip-hop. But then I hear that drone and I realise it’s the ever- diverse Lou Dalfin.
Lou Dalfin (‘The Dolphin’) was founded in 1982 to play the music of Occitania. Orig- inal members Riccardo Serra (drums) and Dino Tron (accordeon) as well as the group’s founder, leader and player of that ever pre- sent hurdy-gurdy, Sergio Berardo, still play with the group. The line-up has since been augmented by Enrico Gosmar, Daniel Jor- dan, Mario Poletti and Chiara Cesano.
As I’m in Italy, I’ve taken the opportu- nity to arrange a day trip from Milan to Turin to meet Sergio. Making my way from the station through numerous grand squares, I cross the tram-lines just north of the Cathedral that contains the city’s holy shroud and immediately find myself in a much shabbier part of town – all street markets, faded grandeur and a multicul- tural population. The kind of place I like! I arrive at a large, old building and am met by Sergio and his daughter, Magali, who runs Musicalista booking agency and rep- resents her father’s band.
Sitting at the sturdy wooden table, I accept a Pedroni cigar from Sergio (an Ital- ian cultural experience after all), and ask about his formative influences. Magali translates his Italian. “He grew up between two important realities. The first is the one of the countryside of the Occitan valley where he lives now. And the other is the city and the metropolitan reality of Turin, where he was born.” His parents, I gather, were not musicians, but music was “some- thing he felt inside of him.”
At an early age he moved to the Occi- tan valleys of the southern Alps, near to Italy’s north-western borders with France and Switzerland. The culture of the region has inspired his whole musical career. Occi- tania is considered to cover much of Southern France, as well as Monaco and some northern fragments of Spain and Italy. It was last united as a country in Roman times, but the Occitan language remains and the area has around 800,000 native speakers.
Magali continues to translate for me, explaining that “growing up in the valleys, Sergio realised he was sitting on a [gold] mine. This Occitan language was the lan- guage of the troubadours.” A term much bandied around these days, the ‘Trobadors’ were a group of Occitan lyri- cists and performers in the 12th and 13th
Centuries. “Beside this, there was a musi- cal richness in the melodies, the instru- ments and the dances. And above all this, it was about the hurdy-gurdy as a totem instrument of the valleys.”
Inspired by tales of Giovanni Conti (also known as Briga), the last hurdy-gurdy player of the valleys who died in 1935, Ser- gio travelled to the French side of Occita- nia to learn from the old players there. He went on to tour extensively around Europe and North America with the group La Ciapa Rusa (fR254/255). Much as he benefited from experiencing these foreign cultures, he came to realise that “he was travelling but he was not playing his music for the people of his valley.” He returned home with an idealistic zeal, intent on giv- ing the traditional music of his home back to its people.
The task wasn’t simple. “He was realis- ing,” Magali continues, “that folk music was totally detached from the musical imagination of teenagers at that moment. They needed something else. They talk in Occitan language, but they didn’t want Occitan music because it was something for old people”. Sergio considered his own tastes: the Rolling Stones, the Clash and Lou Reed played as big a part as any tradi- tional music, but he had always considered them “another world”.
Hence the formation of Lou Dalfin. In its early days in the 1980s it was an acous-
Sergio Berardo of Lou Dalfin P
tic group, but the electrified version that returned in the ’90s has proven definitive. What, for me, distinguishes Lou Dalfin from many of Britain’s folk-rock bands is that it is not fixed in time and has contin- ued to reflect contemporary music as it has evolved, leading to an eclectic canon of work. A typically Dalfinesque move was the release of an album, Remescla in 1998, consisting of remixes by the likes of Ahilea, Dum Dum Project and DJ Badmarsh. And the most recent album, Cavalier Faidit from 2011, features reggae singer Bunna of Africa Unite, explorative Sicilian trum- peter Roy Paci, Marseille’s Moussu T and a tight, swaggering rap interlude which, I’m amazed to learn, is the work of Sergio himself! “He wants to do popular music,” Magali translates. “He is not interested in archaeology.”
leasingly, Lou Dalfin’s approach has proven to be hugely inspirational and there is now a thriving scene of exciting Occitan bands, all of whom owe a debt to the group. Those that have caught my ear include Abnoba, Lou Seriol and Gai Saber. “Yeah! [We were] the first, and the others after,” Sergio tells me in English. Interview done, I’m invited round the corner to a café, where we raise our glasses of grappa to toast the history and the future of the influential and ever compelling Lou Dalfin.
www.loudalfin.it F 19 f
Photo: Davide Gallizio
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