Summary 👇
🔸Editorial
After Urkult and Jeonju Sori Festival and the meaning of art
🔸Talk with Gigi di Luca, from Festival Ethnos
🔸Brief news from the media, charts and sister projects
🔸A little something from my side: Xabi Aburruzaga’s new album coming soon!
🔸Open calls and professional events: Annual Conference of the European Folk Network announced the program; Noura Mint Seymali Will Receive the WOMEX 25 Artist Award; Visa for Music 2025 – Professional Accreditations & ExpoStand Booths Now Open
🔸Meet me at ✈️ World Music Festival Bratislava and more
Hello, how are you? I hope well!
I am well and exhausted and full of recent memories and great expectation for the new season. Since the last newsletter I travelled with Vigüela to Urkult in Sweden and to Sori Festival in Jeonju in South Korea. In the picture, I am with Juan Antonio Torres and with the other two men who I talked about in the previous newsletter: Antonio Mirón and Eduardo Gómez-Olmedo. It was the last night there and the relaxed one, as we had already made a workshop and a concert the days before. Two days earlier, we had the chance to attend the thrilling opening show.
This year, the opening show was a production by the National Changgeuk Company ‘심청 of Pansori theater “Shim Cheong”, written and directed by Yona Kim. Pansori is a traditional Korean form of musical storytelling in which a singer narrates long epic tales with drum accompaniment and powerful vocal expression. In this production, however, it was conceived as if it were an opera, with more complex staging, countless artists on stage, and dozens of musicians. It was marvelous—beautiful, dark, heartbreaking. When it ended, my legs were trembling. I imagined the immense amount of work, the countless hours of people’s lives, and so much concentrated talent coming together to create that magic. It seemed to me an example that encapsulated the best of humanity.A couple of weeks before we were in Urkult, Sweden. A festival in the middle of the forest that gathers thousands of festival-goes and hundreds of artists. Totally different challenges and still so meaningful. That is what art is. Its usefulness is abstract. Its impact, unquestionable and unforgettable.
In the previous edition I announced an interview with Ultranesia. It will have to be in the next edition. I haven’t been able to edit it in time to make it into this August issue. So I’m announcing it again, hoping the hype will grow even more. I believe the ideas they share open up very important reflections.
Another example of the best of humanity is what we are going to talk about further below with Gigi di Luca: the Ethnos Festival, in Campania, the region around Naples. This year it celebrates its thirtieth edition, which begins on September 6.
If you enjoyed any part of this newsletter, feel free to share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you in advance.
AND NOW THE FLOOR IS FOR:
GIGI DI LUCA, FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF FESTIVAL ETHNOS IN CAMPANIA (ITALY)
I had the chance to learn about the history of Ethnos and the vision of Gigi di Luca during his presentation at Napoli World in 2022. I talked about it briefly in this previous edition. He explained some situations in which the festival has responded to complicated events that have taken place in and around the Naples community.
He mentioned, for example, the two occasions when Miriam Makeba performed at the festival, as a statement specifically against racism. And that the second time, she ended the concert early because she felt unwell and shortly afterwards died in Castel Volturno, a town 30 minutes from Naples. Gigi recalled how, ten years later, at the tribute concert to Nelson Mandela and Miriam Makeba, a dove remained on stage throughout the concert, suggesting that the soul of the South African artist was accompanying them on that occasion.
Now, just a few days before the beginning of the 30th edition, Gigi shares some thrilling insights about Ethnos.
AT: The festival was born in 1995, which means it is already 30 years old. Congratulations. Please tell me why you started it and what aspects came together at that moment that made it possible to begin this initiative.
GDL: Ethnos was born right from the beginning with a precise vision, that of recovering the memory of Vesuvian popular culture and making it meet with the traditions and music of the world. In 1995 the folk revival in Italy was already surpassed and forgotten, and Africa was seen only in a negative light for migratory flows, as was the case with other immigrants arriving from Albania, Romania, North Africa. Thinking of a contemporary festival that would bring world music to historical places in the cities at the foot of Vesuvius to create cross-pollination, beauty, and raise awareness towards the knowledge of the other was for me necessary and today I can say it was successful after 30 years of achievements.
AT: I understand that your festival has a discourse towards the world, which you illustrate through the programming. How do you choose the artists for each edition?
GDL: The festival takes place in an itinerant form in marvelous cultural sites of different cities ranging from Naples to the entire Vesuvian coast. The selection of the artists therefore responds to the need to create a relationship between the music and the space. It is important to offer the audience an experience that passes through emotions and perceptions, like an act of deepening life and not as mere entertainment. I dedicate a lot of time to creating a program that meets all these requirements and that above all I like, that gives me emotions, that transfers to me a richness in listening, in sight and in the mind, as well as infusing positive vibrations into the soul.
This is the program of this year’s edition. Below, the conversation continues:
AT: Do you have other activities apart from the concerts?
GDL: Yes, the festival with a multidisciplinary program develops naturalistic itineraries, guided tours in the cultural heritage sites that host Ethnos, and in the historic centers of the partner cities. Furthermore, workshops, conferences, thematic panels, exhibitions. A separate section is dedicated to emerging music with a contest called Ethnos Gener/Azioni and one for schools, named Ethnos for Schools, which continues for several months and brings young people closer to the music of other cultures. I want to recall that the territory where Ethnos takes place, that of Naples and the Vesuvian area, is rich in history, archaeological parks, and natural beauties, a peculiarity and I would say a privilege of the festival, but it is also a duty to valorize them and make them known to the widest possible public.
AT: What difficulties do you face that are particular to the land where you are making the festival? I believe your region has a special scourge, which is the mafia. If you want to comment on this, it could be interesting. On other occasions when I have attended your public lectures, you have given some hints. How do you deal with it?
GDL: The difficulties are linked only to the uncertainty of public funding, to the technical timing with which the funds are assigned. Even though the commitment of the Campania Region has guaranteed with financial resources throughout these years an important continuity and stability. To the Region is added the Ministry of Culture, which supports Ethnos as a Historic Festival, and the partner municipalities. Criminality has never interfered or created any problem. It is not a business sector they look at and moreover, the situation has greatly improved thanks to the work of law enforcement.
AT: In a previous edition I explained the very moving anecdote you had with Miriam Makeba. It is here. Would you highlight any other moment? One in which you noticed how that discourse you want to send to the world was especially strengthened, perhaps?
GDL: Ethnos has a poetic and political vision. Music has the task of narrating, denouncing, opposing. And behind the artists there are stories, painful and beautiful at the same time, there is humanity. It is natural that we are aligned for peace and against war and at the side of artists who have made of their art a resistance in life. Along this line there are many episodes to remember, such as the embrace of the Neapolitan people to Mercedes Sosa with the audience arriving at the concert with Argentine flags. Grandchildren, great-grandchildren of generations of emigrants to Buenos Aires.
Or the inspections during the sound check of Cheikka Remitti, threatened by Islamic fundamentalists.
Or the enchantment of Sakamoto who in silent meditation observes the Spanish quarters of Naples.
There would be many to recall, but above all the courageous artistic choices of the festival that no longer looks at the big names, but that has created a relationship of trust with its audience, has created a community.
AT: Another important aspect of your festival are the locations. What is special about them and what are the criteria for choosing them? Does this festival have any permanent place in these locations?
GDL: I always tell my international colleagues how difficult but exciting it is to organize an itinerant festival that unfolds in 8 cities, in places so beautiful and important. Spaces from 200 to 1000 people that deserve respect above all: The Vesuvian Villas of the 1700s, The Bourbon Palace of Portici, The Archaeological excavations, the Museums, the Churches, the Trails of the Vesuvius National Park. Once I organized the concert of Kamilya Joubran at the historic cemetery of Fontanelle in Naples, a marvelous mystical experience. They are places that evoke, that live of imaginations, and in these places I, with the eye of a theatre director that I have, create the contrast with contemporaneity, make music be born from the spaces more than containing it in the spaces.
I was thinking how may it be to attend a concert in one of thouse Vesuvian Villas. Perhaps with this picture you can have an idea. Picture: Di Angelo – Villa Campolieto, CC0, Collegamento
AT: Ethnos prioritizes one single concert per night in historical places that are unconventional for festivals. What challenges and opportunities does this choice imply in logistical and creative terms?
GDL: It is complex and important to offer the audience a program that is mainly of deepening, of cultural knowledge. The audience that Ethnos has formed is cultivated, curious and the programming is free, not conditioned by business factors. The audience comes to the festival for the festival, for its proposal. They follow the stages in all the cities. For me it is a great satisfaction and pride the total trust that I have from them. But I also know that the choice of the artist who performs every night must necessarily be of a high level. The proposals I make are almost all in national exclusivity, the artists arrive in Naples for Ethnos and leave. There is a great work behind the programming and the realization of every single concert.
AT: Italy is a land with very diverse and I think very strong musical traditions. How important is it for you to include local expressions along with international proposals?
GDL: It is important to give space to young people and to projects that year after year are being formed. For this reason I wanted to create the contest Ethnos Gener/Azioni, which receives about 150 applications every year from artists who want to play at the Festival. To the winner, after a careful selection by a jury of experts, the opportunity is given to hold concerts in other festivals and for the following year also at Ethnos. The local, regional, and Southern Italian scene I instead place within a section called Le Terre del Rimorso, which however is not held every year, and which is an observatory on popular culture and on its present and future.
AT: If you could make one wish regarding the festival, whatever it may be, what would you ask for?
GDL: That of giving the festival much more life. We have reached the thirtieth anniversary and it is a historic milestone, an achievement in a territory where everything changes quickly from administrations to fashions to language to communication. The history of the festival and of what it has been able to build can be enclosed in 5 themes: Resistance, Diversity, Territory, Community, Generations. I would like to add for the future the theme Research, intended as a return to origins, research of one’s own identity and research of one’s own happiness through the encounter with the other.
AT: For any other idea you want to share with the readers, here is your space.
GDL: One can choose to make commercial or pop music; Ethnos has chosen world music, the music of other worlds where the stories of difficult territories make themselves heard.
One can choose, in the panorama of the so-called world music, to make entertainment, parties, parades. Ethnos has chosen deepening.
One can choose squares for concerts, Ethnos has chosen cultural heritage, historical sites, even sacrificing available seats.
One can change course, follow fashions, Ethnos after 30 years is faithful to itself and proudly claims its projectual and artistic line.
Ethnos is a magnificent journey into an inner world. A sensing more than listening. An observing more than seeing.
BRIEF NEWS FROM THE MEDIA, CHARTS AND SISTER PROJECTS 
🔸#1 for Transglobal World Music Chart in August of 2025 is: Mustafa Said & Asil Ensemble’s Maqam pilgrims (Mapamundi Música). Once again I will say that I am not voting in TWMC since April 2024, when I released an album with Mapamundi Música as a label. The quality of Mustafa’s work, who had already the support of the Aga Khan Music Program (he was winner of the Aga Khan Music Awards 2019) well deserved.
🔸Mundofonías: in August we made holidays 🙂
A LITTLE SOMETHING FROM MY SIDE:
Xabi Aburruzaga, about to release his new album
Xabi Aburruzaga has been pushing himself to the limit for months to produce his new album. It will be the seventh in his career. In May he had to pause this effort for a few days: he was participating in the Universal Expo in Osaka, selected by Acción Cultural Española. He and his musicians came back thrilled by the audience’s reception.
While the album is being finalized, Xabi has shared this beautiful video of a tribute concert to Kepa Junkera, where he performs with the Cobla Sant Jordi and the dance company Kukai Dantza.
Do you have a call of interest for our community that you want to share? Let me know asap
OPEN CALLS & PROFESSIONAL EVENTS
This section is open for news. It is free of charge. You can let me know if you have any open call of relevance to the community.
🔸 The Annual Conference of the European Folk Network announced the program
The 2025 EFN conference will take place in Manresa, Catalonia, Spain on Friday 10 and Saturday 11 October, alongside the Fira Mediterrània de Manresa, combining two days of debate, networking and artistic showcases. Check the details and register, here. The EFN Conference 2025 will take place
The programme focuses on topics like diversity and inclusion, minority languages and cultures, the Ethno movement, and the Balkan folk scene.
Breakout groups will explore EFN’s future priorities in areas like dance, festivals, education, and equality. The event also includes networking lunches, a reception hosted by local wine producers, and access to Fira Mediterrània’s wide range of music and dance showcases.
🔸 Noura Mint Seymali Will Receive the WOMEX 25 Artist Award
I wanted to congratulate the Mauritanian artist Noura Mint Seymali and also Glitterbeat Records, who have already supported her on two albums and will soon release another one with this label.
🔸 Visa for Music 2025 – Professional Accreditations & ExpoStand Booths Now Open
For more details, check this link.
MEET ME AT
This year I will attend for the 3rd time the World Music Festival Bratislava. In the link you have the program, which includes a dance workshop (flamenco) and a couple of interesting conferences: Tradition, fusion, hybridity: contemporary Romani musical landscapes in Slovakia, by Jana Ambrózová, and Innovations in connection with traditional music, by Mgr. art. Ján Šicko, ArtD. And two of the delegates attending this edition have been protagonists of this newsletter. Click their names to visit those editions: Said Chaouch and Christian Pliefke.
5th-6th September. With Thanos Stavridis & Drom in Tavira, Portugal.- 19th-21th September. World Music Festival Bratislava, as a delegate.
- 23th September. Almería. Celebration of the European Folk Day by Clasijazz, with a concert by Vigüela.
- 1st – 6th October. I will join Ali Doğan Gönültaş in this tour →
- 9th – 11th October. Fira Mediterrània de Manresa + Annual Conference of the European Folk Network
- 13th – 15th October. Sofia, Bulgaria. For SoAlive Music Conference. It includes the performance by Ali on the opening evening on 14th October.
- 20th – 26th October. WOMEX. Tampere, Finland.
In November I have some international dates with Ali and with Vigüela, I will attend Mundial Montreal and perhaps some more things that I will talk about in the next edition.