The 25th anniversary CD

This is the fifth production by La Lionetta and a further step along the way that links traditional music and songwriting.
At this point the Celtic-Piedmontese root is tightly entwined with new sounds that have come from outside Europe and are heard down the streets of Turin. The city is once again the meeting place where different cultures know each other and mutually exchange experiences: in the 1970s it was the third ‘southern’ city of Italy, due to the conspicuous presence of immigrants from the South of Italy, nowadays the capital of Piedmont is a crossroad where the local tradition mingles with that of southern Italy and those of the newcomers from Eastern Europe, black or Arabian Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The stories we tell—what with irony and involvement—in these songs are often ‘half-breed’ stories, just as our souls are of descendant of previous immigrants.

Most of the tracks which form this work are originals; the only two traditional are: Re Ungino, a fragment of a ballad from Valle Stura (on western Alps), and Potere del Canto (cat. Nigra 47), a traditional text with new music.
Also Ij Fòi-Fotù is in Piedmontese language but has got ‘cultivated’ origins: from a lyric written by Angelo Brofferio (1802-1866) when he was in prison during the Savoyard reign—he being an anticlerical and libertarian poet that eventually became a left-wing deputy in the Piedmontese parliament.
The lyrics in Piedmontese are transcribed according to the most updated standardized writing, while La Bèla Dre’la Fnesta is in the writing used for the French-Provençal dialect. Re Ungino is a hybrid between Piedmontese and Occitan and consequently it is printed as it was transcribed by C. Sanga and R. Leidy.
Manolita is dedicated to Emanuela, a gipsy young girl child taken away by the flood that scourged Piedmont in November 2000. Tempo is dedicated to Music Ale (‘io piace to see you’), a clochard of undefined age and origin.