Thursday, February 26, 2015

Neapolitan Musicians: Gabriela Rinaldi and Max Carola, and friends

Sunday, February 22, still in Naples, and the highlight of our week - you thought it was Vesuvius perhaps? - No, it was dinner with our landlady and her family. 

Gabriella Rinaldi and Max Carola are musicians, from an old Neapolitan family, living just upstairs from us in a beautiful big flat, wonderful people. We ate and ate, talked and talked far into the night.

Max primarily does production and post-production, mainly these days in Berlin (the European center for contemporary music; he says it's the big scene these days, like San Francisco in the 1960s). Here is a link to a youtube video he and Gabriella did together: Max and Gabriella.

Gabriella has a bigger web presence than Max, such as her business Voce e Canto (here's the link: voceecanto.it) and her own music in many youtube videos. A couple examples of her music, you can click on them: Partenodance Rhapsody, and Borderline 

Their other guest was a Dutch oboist moving to Umbria to start a b&b/arts colony. Onno Verschoor, very charming guy. You can read about his summer project at this link: summer course in Perugia. It just sounds like so much fun!

A pleasure to meet the extended family (says Julianne), eat Neapolitan winter food, be among kindly generous people who take music seriously.  We have now been introduced to the music of Pino Daniele, who mixes Neapolitan music with R&B.  He died recently at too young of an age.  To see a video of him playing with Eric Clapton, click on this link: Pino Daniele with Eric Clapton

Our hosts, Max Carola and Gabriella Rinaldi, produced a concert by Richard Galliano at the Vesuvius Crater last summer, which you can hear by clicking this link: Richard Galliano at Vesuvius

Jazz accordion--seems like a contradiction, but it sure does work.

We were charmed and impressed by their openhearted hospitality...and of course by the food. Spaghetti with homemade sauce (the primi), sausages (the secondi), broccoletti (the contorno), and cake with almonds and orange peel (the dolce). Oh, that was good! Max has a particular way of handling pasta and sauce, which our friend Donna Ellefson, who has been with us on these adventures in Naples, has set about learning. We all want to be Italian cooks.

We have to do this posting with no pictures, but I hope the music links make up for that.

by Nancy and Julianne

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