"Masters of the Spider Dance Revival" will be in San Francisco tonight, stopping for just one performance on their North American summer tour, at Café du Nord.
Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino (CGS) comes from Salento in Southern Italy, home of pizzica hurtling six-beat rhythms and songs that were used in ancient, ecstatic healing rituals to cure the bite of the tarantula. Tracing its roots back to the sixth century, this music drives dancers into a trance-like state, followed — if all goes well — by the audience.
It's music, the band leader says, that "talks directly to the inner, instinctive and archetypical part of everybody — it still has the power to bring you elsewhere."
The legend is that pizzica (bite) music was performed by itinerant musicians to help peasant women in Puglia recover from a tarantula spider's deadly bite. The music dealt with a variety of illnesses at a time when there were few doctors. It was a form of exorcism or voodoo, where the woman danced herself into a trance as the music got faster to "kill the spider" inside her.
Tinged with voodoo, trance-like pizzica-taranta folk music has added rhythm to one of Italy's cultural hotspots, Melpignano, a town where locals still speak Griko, a dialect believed to be a holdover from the 8th century BCE Greek rulers of Puglia.
Formed in 1975, the group is an acclaimed traditional music ensemble of a seven-piece band and dancer Silvia Perrone. CGS has scored with 17 albums and countless live performances throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. In 2010, the group was awarded the Best Italian World Music Group title.
Now led by Mauro Durante, son of founders Daniele and Rossana Durante, the company has appeared with such varied artists as Ballake Sissoko, Ibrahim Maalouf, Piers Faccini, and Stewart Copeland of The Police. Durante has served as musical assistant to Ludovico Einaudi, Maestro Concertatore of the Italian La Notte della Taranta festival.