English Liner notes (courtesy of our beloved English editor, Josh Mitchell) of the first album in the LUOMO DELLARMONICA series, LUOMO DI RAME. The album features a wonderful harmonica performance for a holy function. Enjoy them :) 84 years, parts of which were very intense—so intense you could fill a small encyclopedia. I could tell you about his life during the war, about his experiences as a partisan, of the weariness of building a future after that disaster, of his passion for that small instrument that made him do incredible things, of his love offering to my mother in the gift of a bouquet of furs instead of the usual flowers since he didn’t have enough money for them, of incredible nights spent playing in recording studios in which the air was so dense with smoke that it could’ve been cut with a knife, of how he came from Turin to Rome with little money in his pocket, a woman to love and so much heart and courage, of how he was happy to work with exceptional friends and colleagues, of the good feelings he had for them, of his vacation in Talamone with Luciana and Enrico, about his passion for cooking, for gardening, for music. If I did, we’d probably grow old before I finished. I also want to tell you things you don’t know. The only thing that maybe some of you didn’t know very well concerning Franco, “daddy,” is that he was an extraordinary person. Well, since we are now dealing with such a mournful event, you might be thinking that I simply want to fill my mouth with such a canonic expression as “Daddy was an extraordinary person,” but what does it truly mean? In the world, we have a lot of ordinary situations; we are surrounded by them. It’s the relationship between us and our environment. If we are similar to the people close to us then we are normal, ordinary, and if they are different then us we are extraordinary, or more vulgarly, abnormal. Who was Franco in the scheme of things? Was he a great artist? A good friend? A caring father? A friendly stranger? Everybody could behave in those ways to a degree more or less intense than Franco. The world is full of such people. Is it because he played his instrument so well? We could provide many obvious examples of that, but you already know because you had the pleasure of listening to him perform. So, why was he so extraordinary? Was he vulgarly abnormal? Not at all. He was full of resources, tenacious, intelligent, charismatic, lively, but most of all he had a unique ability: he filtered everything through the reason of his heart. Heart, the tireless engine that guided him his entire life. Franco could put that personal prestigious touch in everything he did. To deal with him was a never-ending surprise, since, naturally, he who is guided by his heart can’t be predicted. I want you to reflect on this aspect. I’m sure you share in your own history with Franco at least one extraordinary episode, an event that binds you to him in an original way and which if you’d experienced with someone else surely would have been more ordinary. With 79 years on his shoulders, he was asked to perform in San Ginesio, in March, during a concert. He was welcomed warmly with all the proper etiquette by the mayor, aldermen, and so on. At the time speaking, Franco was a large, disabled man who had to walk with a cane, and a bit forgetful because of his age. He came to that little town to play harmonica in a desecrated church. With a twenty five-piece orchestra and fifty-person chorus, the place was full; there was no space for anyone else. Franco was sitting at my side. The concert began, very nice and well performed, with music by Rota, Morricone, Trovajoli. In the audience were refined, elegant people, the local politicians... Everything was very formal. After every performance, the orchestra conductor would bow in a very flagrant fashion, and in doing so always put his hands on the inner part of his legs. At the moment when the theme from Once Upon a Time in the West was about to be performed, my father was called by the announcer, generating much applause. Franco, nearly 80 years old, certainly not an aggressive looking man due to his obvious limp and his face marked by age, took the microphone and said to the orchestra conductor: “Maestro, you are very good, you conduct a very nice orchestra and everybody here is in tune, but there’s one thing I really can’t understand…” (At this point, the Maestro was transforming himself into a huge question mark.) “Why every time you bow toward the audience do you touch your balls?” People had tears in their eyes… This was Franco’s wizardry, his extraordinary feature. He was in a desecrated church in front of politicians, well-dressed people, old ladies and children, and that ancient man, innocent, with an ordinary aspect, an uncertain pace, ignoring every protocol had immediately turned every convention upside down—he had won even before he even began. With a single phrase, he had already won all the hearts in the crowd, from the first to the last, with his disarming simplicity. That evening my father was incredible. He received a lot of applause: the first respectful, the last long and straight from the heart, from people who recognized having faced an extraordinary person. In less than an hour, he had conquered hundreds of people who barely knew who he was. And yes, my father was infectious, he imposed his way of communicating, and if you didn’t speak his language you could never have gotten his attention. His way of communicating was like a secret recipe on the level of artistry. In his field, it made him perform incredibly, in a way that even nowadays people find difficult to understand how it could have been possible, and on the human level, in the vernacular of everyday life, in a simple gesture such as cooking, he denied this peculiarity with great humility, but not everyone could fully understand it. For all those who knew him, this was his greatest lesson, which he would give to everybody without exception: live with heart and feelings and you, too, will be extraordinary people who will do extraordinary things. Daniele De Gemini, read by Enrico De Gemini in the Artists Church during Franco De Gemini funeral, 22 July 2013
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 06:45:46 +0000
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