Uaragniaun lands in NY. The historic folk band of Puglia (Southern Italy) presents the New York audience with a show that is the synthesis of a long research on ancient traditional songs. "Uaragniaun project" reproposes songs from Puglia and in particular from Altamura (Murgia area, Bari province). They present an original musical repertoire from Puglia that has not been explored yet. Work songs, tarantelle, love songs, religious songs, tammurriate, dances and rhythms are proposed in a new musical dimension, a mix that combines tradition and innovation. Through the use of traditional instruments, the group develops interesting musical combinations suitable for the extraordinary vocal abilities of the singer and researcher Maria Moramarco.
The group has released ten projects on CD since 1990, They have performed in the most important world music festivals in Italy and abroad and they have collaborated with several international musicians.
During this small tour in North America, Maria Moramarco (vocals and guitar), Luigi Bolognese (guitar and mandolin), Silvio Teot (percussion), Filippo Giordano (violin), Nanni Teot (trumpet), and Michele Bolognese (mandolin) performed in Montreal on August 9, for the first edition of “Sapori di Puglia,” in a concert dedicated to the Italian immigrants in Quebec; on August 11 they performed at the 5th Main Museum, in Peaks Island, Maine; and New York will see the band on Sunday, August 16th, at 7.00 p.m., at The National Opera Center (for reservations, call: 718 837 0876).
What’s the meaning of Uaragniaun? It’s a legend and myth, it is a sound, an onomatopoeia, it is also a location in the Murgia area, a sharp rock rich of mysteries and passions. Uaragniaun is a musical project to tell the stories of the ancestral people, of “the stones” in the Murgia’s rocky landscape, but also of the misery and nobility of peasants’ life, that “hell” in the old times of Puglia, when men were beasts and heroes at the same time.
Maria Moramarco is the heart of the project, the main researcher, and also its voice. A crystalline voice and a powerful, natural daughter of the old singers who passed on the oral tradition of Puglia’s Murgia, a region surrounded by the Mediterranean, contiguous to so many other ancient civilizations.
