Albafar
Salvo Barbas Barbagallo Soprano Sax and Oud
Pier Paolo Alberghini Double Bass
Fulvio Farkas Tabla, Darbuka, Cajon, Congas
“Albafar” is an acronym, evocative and involuntarily exotic, an exercise in transmutation of our names, as if wanting to testify that the only starting point, for open and yet-to-be-defined destinations, is given by the encounter of three musicians, three stories, three evolving styles, temporarily sharing a place, a sentiment, a common desire. What can bring together an atypical “jazz” saxophonist, who for years plays the Arabic ney, recorders, and double reeds in medieval and Middle Eastern ancient music ensembles, then finds himself mingling with radical Central European improvisers, with an equally “unclassifiable” double bassist, a conservatory graduate spanning from mainstream jazz to contemporary, from Argentine tango to the music of Sicilian tradition, and with a philosophy teacher who periodically moves to India to study traditional ragas and learn the noble and ancient art of Indian tabla, only to dedicate himself to polyrhythmic percussion?
Our music aims to be a “praise of inconsistency,” a ceaseless wandering, the exaltation of a “refusal,” the denial of categorization into genre labels, of the easy mannerisms of predefined stylistic practices. It is wandering, migrating, borderless music, in perpetual vagrancy, escaping every attempt at definition, at least within predetermined cages, unified and monolithic schemes. We would like the result to be a varied and heterogeneous stylistic hybrid, a multiplex unity open to every attempt at deconstruction and decontextualization of pre-existing musical forms, open to every musical language, even belonging to the most distant traditions, as long as it is translatable and recomposable ad libitum with a hopefully personal and recognizable sonic imprint. Each of our performative encounters, strongly characterized by free and extemporaneous improvisation, reveals itself to us as a surprise, a unique and unrepeatable experience, an exploratory journey without a predetermined outcome.
