msmgreco
I'm a banjo/concertina player from Rome. I play regular session twice a month in pubs and gigs with a band named "Dockside".
This is my biography:
He is the most famous banjo player in the building where he lives. After repeated protests from the neighbours during his banjo practice he decided to start playing the anglo-concertina so he could alternate the two.The neighbours didn't appreciate this sensible thought and continued knocking on the walls with a broomstick. Finally after few months they got used to the irish music and they started knocking on the walls in 6/8 time.
The reason why he started to be interested in irish music is unknown: some say it was because he was a colour-blind. About 17 years ago he went to a bookshop to buy a book of italian music but he got the red colour mixed up with the orange colour and ended up buying a book of irish music.
For years he thought Green groves of Erin was a name in dialect for a traditional sardinian dance. He started having his first doubts on his first trip to Ireland when in a pub some locals asked him to play an Italian tune: he started "the kesh jig" (a neapolitan tarantella for him) and he was very surpised that the local musicians could follow him and even play it better than him. So he got a pint of guinness (which he thought was a big expresso coffee) and he started singing "Ar bhruach na carrige baine" in perfect Donegal Irish. After this he confessed to his irish friends that he couldn't understand the words of the song, because this dialect was very old and that hardly anyone spoke it in Italy anymore. But one of the irish friend translated exactly the words of the song for him. He was even more surprised than before and asked his irish friend if his grandparents were Italian. He said "yes". He was Gino Lupari (Four man & a dog).
But it is as a composer that Massimo is at his best. Famous for compositions such as "there is a smoked salmon swimming in my bath-tub" reel, which entered immediately as part of the traditional repertoire of Irish music and very quickly disappeared. In fact it was played, for the first time, in public during a session at the Fiddler's Elbow pub, on saturday 12 october 1985 at 19.30 and, for the last time, the following day at 22.15. And who doesn't remember the
fine hornpipe "a bottle bottle-green", the first tune from a long series known as his "chromatic phase" (other titles: a lemon lemon-yellow, a shock shocking-pink, a violet violet). In 1991 Massimo Greco proposed a subversion of traditional music conventions through some interesting experimental compositions: in "Amatriciana reel" the rhythmmic support of a bodhran is substituted by the hard sound of a wooden spoon striking a pot of boiling amatriciana sauce for six people. The "curved plain" jig was written for a tenor banjo and for the pedals of a grand piano. This music, as he confessed to his caretaker the day he forgot his keys in the flat, brought him back to his childhood when he bought his first mandolin and tried to play it by blowing on the bridge. Two months later discouraged by the results, he tried with an accordion, blowing on the buttons of the keyboard. This instrument also proved difficult so he devoted himself to the fiddle, blowing directly on the strings. In the end he arrived at the conclusion that wind instruments were not for him.
Tunes in msmgreco's tunebook: 2