event
Tuesday 9 April 2019 ore 18:00 - 19:30

Street Music | Blues.The birth of contemporary music

MAXXI Auditorium – entrance 5 euro – subscription to three meetings 10 euro
free for holders of the myMAXXI card until full capacity

curated by Ernesto Assante and Gino Castaldo

The street is the place of popular music, a physical place but also, and above all, a conceptual space, an idea, around which much music has been written, sung, and played. Indeed, along the roads of music dreams, visions, thoughts, ideas were born, which have found different forms, which have turned into songs, works, and compositions. The aim of these meetings is to draw a map of the rich, complex, fruitful relationship between the street and music, a relationship that we could say was born with the music itself, which passed through folk, rock, blues and, today, rap. Three appointments to retrace the long road that leads to us.


BLUES
with Alex Britti

A legend says that one night Robert Johnson had gone to the centre of a crossroads at midnight and there he started playing, waiting for something he didn’t know what it could be. At one point a black man arrived who had taken his guitar, tuned it, played an unknown tune and then returned the instrument to him. The legend of the crossroads and the pact with the devil is almost certainly false, but the story has gradually spread over the years. It is the most mythical street of the blues, the “crossroads” that Johnson sang in the song with the same name, the first of many crossroads, of a thousand streets, that the bluesmen have physically travelled with their guitars and their stories, all the way up to present day.

Alex Britti, prominent musician of the contemporary panorama of Italian and international Jazz and Blues, will tell us this and many other stories about Blues.