Alla Boara's Italian Christmas at Trinity Cathedral

Alla Boara
Trinity Cathedral
Cleveland, OH
December 6, 2024

Here in North America most of our Christmas traditions have origins in northern Europe. So the notion of an Italian Christmas might be hard to visualize. Santa filling stockings while eating biscotti and gulping down an espresso then merrily riding off on a Vespa? Well, why not? If the season is about keeping spirits bright, Alla Boara, brought the sun of the Mezzogiorno to the bleak midwinter of the Great Lakes.

The band was formed in Cleveland three years ago on the novel premise of setting the demotic music of pre-industrial Italy in jazz arrangements. That was the source of the Christmas program, though some of the material, like the two charming pastorales that began the program, had little to do with the season. "Tu Scendi Dalle Stelle," the evening's first singalong, is an popular Italian Christmas song that praises the divine poverty of the Christ child. As the evening progressed, poverty would emerge as a throughline; both "Maitinata" from Abruzzo and the Calabrian "Che bera Sta Figghiola" were originally sung by the alms seekers who wandered villages during holidays.

With the latter the Alla Boara playbook emerged in miniature, with Amanda Powell's dramatically inflected vocals charging into a post-bop breakdown driven by the rhythm team of Taddeo and bassist Ian Kinnaman. On "Donna Donna," Powell, alternately teased and rebuked her counterpart Tommy Lehman in a saucy patter song that Taddeo described as "like the good-natured arguments that erupt at an Italian Christmas dinner." Here as elsewhere, Powell, trained as an operatic soprano evoked a range of emotions using her expressive eyes alone. Lehman did much the same with his horns: tender and lyrical on flügelhorn and high-stepping on trumpet, especially on the joyful "Doman' L'è Festa ("Tomorrow is a holiday. We don't work!"), also propelled by violinist Yaryna Tsarynska.

"Sogna Fiore Mio" is a meltingly lovely song recorded in the Griko-speaking villages of Calabria by folklorist Alan Lomax's sojourn in Italy and a showcase for guitarist Daniel Bruce. His rhapsodic, strolling-minstrel introduction turned the cavernous, Gothic Trinity Cathedral into a moonlit piazza. This was magical stuff if not particularly seasonal.

But Christmas arrived in all its glory with a medley that gathered all the threads of the Alla Boara project into a shining tapestry of sound, the high point of the concert. It began with a reverent reading of "Gesù Bambino," composed in New York by the Italian-born Pietro Yon, floated by Powell's pure, silvery soprano. Yon based the melody and lyrics of the chorus on the chorus of "Oh Come All Ye Faithful," the refrain of which, in Latin, is "Venite adoremus" ("Oh come let is adore him"). One of Lomax's most haunting field recordings captured the sound of a priest intoning those very words in a ruined Abruzzese church in 1954. As Powell's voice evaporated into the Trinity's vaulted expanse, Taddeo launched Lomax's recording as Lehman's trumpet echoed and commented in counterpoint with the sung Latin like a cantor. Powell took a seat at the piano, pounding out churchy block chords for a singalong in English of the beloved carol, and when she was joined by the cathedral's thundering pipe organ, played by Shiloh Roby, it was a lump-in-the-throat moment.

Coming after this high-church majesty, the concluding singalong of "Silent Night" should have been an anticlimax, but as Powell explained, the Italian lyrics with which she began the performance, have little to do with the ones we Anglophones know. And they are lovely, a wish for a better world. "You who have been announced by angelic voices/give light to our minds/And instill peace in our hearts." It was a message, urgently needed, that transcends language.

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