Spreading the lies of oral tradition

GironaThe musician from La Bisbal, Mazoni, who has just celebrated the twenty years of his first album in Catalan, is premiering a new show. It is not a project of new songs nor a revision of old tracks, but rather a very original proposal in which the artist dives into the immense archive of oral tradition music to cover a handful of popular songs centered on the theme of lies. It will premiere on Friday, November 13th, at the unmissable Càntut festival in Cassà de la Selva and on December 9th it will arrive at the Teatre de l'Aliança in Barcelona, thanks to the Festival Clàssics, which, together with the Dansàneu, also co-produces the show.

Faithful to the essential desire to bring closer and make known the repertoire of traditional songs, the Càntut regularly collaborates with pop-rock artists, initially alien to the folk world, to establish symbiosis and open horizons. The latest is Mazoni, to whom the Girona festival proposed about fifty songs about lies, so that he could choose the ones that seduced him the most. At first, the musician did not know much about which paths to follow, but as he began to immerse himself in the repertoire and let his imagination run wild, the project began to take shape. "I was very respectful of it because it is a style I hadn't touched much. It is unreachable, with many versions of each song, and I got a bit lost. At first, I had a mentality of what the official version was, but then I saw that everything was much more open, that if I took a song and incorporated verses from another, it was no sacrilege," explains Mazoni. From there, he began to build his own versions of pieces that are neither pure nor immutable but rather, naturally, have passed through the hands of many generations and allow for all kinds of changes and variations.

“It has been very helpful for me to keep Bob Dylan in mind”

Mazoni is a musician indebted to the great American and Anglo-Saxon bands, a lover of the Beatles and the modern music of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, with guitars and synthesizers. His references certainly contrast with the aesthetics of traditional songs conceived for children, for village dances, or to soothe sorrows. Even so, he has found many more points of contact than discord. “It has been very useful for me to keep Bob Dylan in mind. He has a very folk side and, in reality, many of his ballads are very long stories, in which there is no chorus. Later on, he took them towards rock, and this vision has been especially useful to me, that of someone who comes from Woody Guthrie and who incorporates rock much later,” acknowledges the artist from Empordà.

Certainly, the structure of the songs is one of the essential differences between modern music and the heritage of oral tradition. Popular songs often have only a single stanza, which is repeated over and over with very narrative lyrics, without choruses or bridges like in pop-rock tracks. Once again, however, Mazoni, with Dylan as a great master, finds in it an incentive rather than an obstacle: “The fact of not being in a hurry, that the melody doesn't change much, I like. It doesn't tire me. I don't agree at all with this dopamine-driven world in which it seems that people cannot maintain attention for more than three seconds and need one stimulus after another. I like this tranquility of having ten stanzas ahead and gradually entering into a way of doing things, into a mood, into a story that carries much more weight and is not so much a firework,” he argues.

Jokes, infidelities, or white lies

Everything is articulated around the theme of lies. From songs about crimes committed to achieve material gain to cheating and infidelity, including white lies and implausible fables. This is how Albert Massip, co-responsible for the Càntut project, explains it: “The songs of lies allowed us to talk about many things. We have the world of children’s songs that tell lies, with humor and exaggeration, with a lot of hyperbole. But Mazoni also brings more spite to it, and we have deceptions and romantic disappointments, situations in which reality has exceeded expectations and dealt you a setback”. Mazoni agrees: “Some songs even have a touch of surrealism. Popularly, you might only know two stanzas, but when you have the whole story and see it unfolded, they are brutal”.

At the concert, Mazoni will perform pieces such as Testament d’Amèlia, Ànima morta and Rossinyol que vas a França. The rest will be discovered in the live show, which he will offer accompanied by his regular drummer, Aleix Bou, and the violinist Apel·les Carod Requesens. The repertoirealso includes a couple of his own songs that deal with the issue of lying. They are El crim de les germanes Amanita, from the album Desig imbècil (2019), which tells a bizarre story about the desire to obtain a benefit, and Perduts a la boira, from Esgarrapada (2006), which contains a sentence especially pertinent to the occasion: “All the lies that come from the truth”, says one of the first verses.