Antonio Forcione @ RNCM, Manchester
As a prog-man, I’m used to terrible song names, but those of last night’s Italian acoustic guitarist were particular note-worthy: Spanish Breeze, Indian Café, Brasilico, Knock on Wood, Tears of Joy and so on. As you’d guess there were many different influences in his music and it was definitely an evening of ‘world-jazz fusion’ and the quartet of (from left to right) guitar, cello, double-bass and percussion would be right at home on Later with Jools Holland. But fusion’s ok right? You mix some styles together and add your own twist, what’s wrong with that? When done properly, it’s not a problem; however, Forcione would only dip his toe in each style. Rather than a subtle, tasteful, integrated fusion of styles across his work, Forcione proceeded to commit a series of rather heavy-handed pastiches, often borrowing the most obvious musical clichés only to drop them as he moved into the groove-based solo platform.
It takes years of working with something, making mistakes, and learning past the obvious before that influence will mature in you and become a genuine fusion within your musical style. It shouldn’t be a bolt-on addition to your current armoury of techniques to be picked up and dropped when necessary. The problem is that simply trying your hand at each region’s music, one at a time, will only gain you the most superficial of knowledge about it, and the unfortunate result however is that many tunes simply come across as ‘the Indian-style number’ or ‘the Spanish one’ and are rather gimicky.