Davorio by Samuele Strufaldi

Davorio – Building Futures Through Collaborative Music

Through a musical collaboration between Italian musician Samuele Strufaldi and the villagers of Gohouo-Zagna in the Ivory Coast, a new album called Davorio released on Música Macondo Records, will raise money for a new community library space in the village.

Davorio is the joint efforts of Samuele Strufaldi, and the Guéré musicians of Gohouo-Zagna, located in the Ivory Coast’s Guemon region. The record is a cross-cultural-conversation that tells the villagers’ stories through a modern musical language; one that blends together Guéré music, jazz, and electronica. More than just a record, Davorio is a story about the villagers of Gohouo-Zagna, with their lives, traditions, and cultures animated across the album’s 16-tracks.

The profits from the vinyl and digital music streams of the project and the money raised from a Go Fund Me fundraising page, will be used to help construct a library/community space for the villagers. The goal of building this community space is to support local families, children, young people and women and to act as a meeting place for the creation of partnerships, music making and learning.

Davorio is a collaboration between the NGO Pêrmlay de Gozhou-Zagna, Samuele Strufaldi, and Música Macondo Records, set out to facilitate a cultural-exchange that will benefit the local villagers and musicians, while creating a record that transcends time, borders, and cultures. It all began in August 2019, when Florence-based composer, and musician Samuele Strufaldi was invited by local djembe player Boris Pierrou to journey back to his home village in the Ivory Coast. Here, Strufaldi embellished himself in the local culture, finding himself at home in his new surroundings.

It is while in Gohouo-Zagna, Pierrou informed Strufaldi of his plan to construct a library for the villagers. From this moment on, Strufaldi and Pierrou knew that their work there had to lay the groundwork for the library’s construction.
For Strufaldi, Davorio was always something he wanted to achieve. “It began with the need to enirch my creative world through relations with other people and cultures,” Strufaldi explains, when talking about the album’s origins. As a self-described music-explorer, Strufaldi wanted to work outside of his traditional framework, and create a record that was rooted in all facets of jazz, connecting modern contemporary styles with the music’s ancestral birthplace. As such, the album’s musical language is both modern and old, experimental, and traditional.

Alongside Francesco Gherardi, and local musician Boris Pierrou, Strufaldi went to Gohouo-Zagna to kickstart the cultural-exchange. Whilst in the village, the musicians worked alongside and performed with the Guéré musicians. Throughout the record you can hear children clapping, traditional songs, recordings from percussive sessions, and other musical moments. Littered throughout the tracks are 40-second snapshots of life from Gohouo-Zagna; audio photographs of a life in the village. And, to ensure that none of the context was lost, each songs’ meaning has been detailed within the liner notes, detailing the story of how they came to be.

It is indeed the musical lineage and traditions of the Guéré villagers that is of most importance. The Guéré form part of the much larger Kru ethnic group who have lived in the region for centuries, a culture that have been passing down traditional folk music songs and using traditional percussive instrumentation for many years.

Pierrou and Strufaldi worked with the villagers to create an audio document, a set of recordings that were taken back to Italy where they were remoulded into an album whose music was born from two cultures. Across Davorio, Strufaldi brings together lush electronic and sax melodies, polyrhythmic structures, and traditional Guéré vocals and musicianship, a rich cultural exchange of international styles.

The record is littered with energetic jazz pieces, that include elements of Afro-jazz, and more electronic-based styles. Rhodes keys and shrill saxophones, play out against the beat of the djembe, whilst dynamic drum & bass rhythms intertwine with jungle ambience and serene words and lyrics. Underpinning all the tracks are the vocals, drumming and otherwise unique percussive styles from the Gohouo-Zagna villagers.

“I feel that the creative process into a collective and unconscious territory belongs to everybody, where we can meet each other and find and share new treasures,” Strufaldi states, when trying to explain the album’s process. Something, which is easy to hear across the record’s playtime.

Davorio will available to purchase through Bandcamp, and all good record stores, in addition to being available for streaming. T-shirts will also be available to purchase through the Bandcamp store. 100% of all the revenue generated will be donated and used to complete the village library.

'The purpose of this project is the share any income generated with the people of Gohouo-Zagna, where our work was based. I believe that the people who gave their voices, their stories, and pieces of their amazing heritage for the construction of the sound of this album should benefit from it most of all.'

For more details on the library construction please visit our GoFundMe page.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/davoriobuilding-futures-with-collaborative-music

Samuele Strufaldi is an Italian polyhedric composer and curious explorer. Often researching in various parallel fields such as Music, visual art, movement, psychology, ethnomusicology and sciences.

Those distant things you look at, can finally melt into something unique. everything is connected, everything can stand on a common territory.

...explore.