ROXANA AMED & FRANK CARLBERG
Nothing could ever prepare one for the music of Los Trabajos y Las Noches, by the enthralling Argentinean chanteuse, Roxana Amed and inimitable composer and pianist Frank Carlberg. The reason? Quite simply, nothing prepared Amed and Carlberg themselves for the impact that the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik would have on both artists, who first collaborated to set Pizarnik’s poetry to music on La sombra de su sombra in 2012. Today,Sony Music Latin released their latest collaboration.
Their epic sojourn began in 2010, when Amed first met Carlberg at the Buenos Aires Jazz Festival. “I was absolutely mesmerized by Frank’s musical conception right when I listened to his music from backstage,” Amed recalls. “I had been deep in the thrall of the Pizarnik’s poetry for years, since my college days, preparing for a degree in Contemporary Literature in Spanish,” Amed says. “The hissing acid of affection and surreptitious, violent tenderness of her poems, always at war with her restless soul drew me in and I could never free myself from those qualities of her work. Not that I ever wanted to, of course…” she says.
It all came back to Amed while she was listening seduced by Carlberg’s performance: an erudite, resonant musical soundscape. She may have had a proverbial out-of-body experience right there. “I suddenly found my own voice navigating the waters of Frank’s music, swirling within the ripples of Pizarnik’s poems. I knew, then, that I had to tell Frank of my epiphany. Best of all, the choicest poems by Pizarnik had already begun to form in the depths of my soul.”
The genesis of the original project took flight, when in a matter of months, Amed , was a guest at a dinner at the Carlberg residence with his wife Christine Correa. Carlberg surprised Amed by pulling out a pile of books by Pizarnik, having already composed a significant amount of music to her poems. The pianist began to expound on ideas – even play music – that he had for the rest of the album. To cut a long story short, the album – La sombra de su sombra was completed in record time [in 2013]. But this, he revealed, was only the beginning.
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