Festa Time in Italy

Street Music in the Marche, August 2009

It’s festa time in Italy which means there’s lots of music in the streets. Best so far has been a sextet of soprano sax, alto, two tenors a baritone and a bass – all saxes that is – who played in the park by the chapel at the top of the hill, with all the paths lit with candles. Mixture of stuff, from West Side Story to very modern.

Worst street music so far this year – and there’s stiff competition for this – is probably a Bob Dylan tribute band: that was last night, they were due to start at 9.30 and still weren’t on stage at quarter past ten. Terrible, especially the drummer who seemed to think that bashing the drums was what he was supposed to do, rhythm being someone else’s job.

But the odd thing is that there are all these white moulded plastic chairs and the old folks sit patiently on them, quite impassively, some with their hats on, and watch the show through to the end at about 1am. They did that the previous evening too when there was a nearly-as-bad band consisting of a man playing the electric accordion and working the drums-and-bass synthesizer, while three young girls, probably not 20-years-old, dressed in white high-heel ankle boots, sparkly silver short skirts, and low-cut v-neck tops and bare midriffs, jigged about and sang things like YMCA. And I mustn’t forget the smoke machine that hissed out steam when the synthesizer man got enthusiastic. Again the old folks sat through this rubbish – they always do. Some of it has a distinct feel of Hoxton-pub, 1963.

My pic shows the not so old folks, who tend to sit around for a while towards the beginning. One of my missions for a future trip is to get a good pics of the oldies in their hats.

The old folks – not all the old folks from the town but a contingent of them – sit it through on the white plastic chairs whatever, though I did overhear one man talking to the neighbours on the morning following the terrible Dylan tribute band, saying that he hadn’t enjoyed it, it was like a bomb in your head. Why had he stayed then? Unfortunately, if his answer made any sense at all, I didn’t understand it.