I chanced to hear Gianni Coscia and Gianluigi Trovesi for the first time one evening in March, their music immediately brought to my mind the sacred pine feasts that were celebrated long ago in the same month. They were Roman feasts, invoking Cibele, an Asiatic Goddes and mother of all Frigi Gods, welcomed to the Victoria Temple on the Palatine hill in 204 a.C.

Rome had returned to her for help in the fight against Annibale, who in fact had to leave the peninsula and return to Cartagine. The sacred pine was felled in the thick of the forest, wrapped in cloth as if it were a dead God. It was brought into the city and on the 24^th of March the High Priest, making a cut on his arm, with a knife, offered his blood to the sacred tree. I did not dwell on the feast, nor on the significance of the sacrifice but rather on the roots that were solidly planted in the ground, drawing spirits from the depths of the earth – as the cosmic tree – slowly restoring the pine to the forest. Coscia and Trovesi’s music gave me this idea: sounds that come from the depths bringing light to subterranean spirits, by no almost forgotten. There was jazz, obviously, in the music they played. There was also song, not the consumer type but rather the kind that is deeply tied to our past, making me think of the mazurka, the waltz, and the tango: street music and music played  on the threshing ground, without taking the vestiges of traditional folklore, but rather reinventing it in a new way. It accepted nostalgia from the past, even certain traces of provincialism and some obvious ballad-singer impurities of long ago, restoring it to our times with unusual language, fresh dry and often filled with ironies, acidulous sarcasm’s but also with moments of authentic passion, such that the two seem unable to withdraw from those emotional situations that touched them as boys. We must remember that both come from peasant backgrounds; it is not important that the first was a lawyer before totally dedicating himself to music, and the second a professional clarinet player, possessing a secure cultural sheen from the conservatory.

Certainly, both musicians have memories of afternoons in the countryside, dances under the stars, the strong smell of fresh hay or crushed grapes, heard in their sounds. As I listen to this record I feel the same emotions, even as the music becomes lightly evasive, richer with far away memories while at the same time strongly tied to our daily lives. The charm of Coscia’s accordion will not escape those who listen, finally returned to its forgotten poetic role, just as it will be impossible not to discover the intense sound of Trovesi’s clarinet, profound and evocative or agitated yet calming. Once the sounds have been savoured we have the music composed by the two musicians: The music is filled with the past, each experience, every languor and yet it is conceived with modern language, able to carry unedited lexicon; just as the duo (although very old) is unedited, worn down, banal and abandoned. The two musicians are able to offer new ideas, words full of lyrics, and everlasting smile. From the “Roots”, the name which I gave to the duo in that faraway March, the new sacred pine has been born and with it music that is both old and new: ancient emotions in a climate of extraordinary actuality.