At the tip of Italy’s heel, the Salento peninsula smells of salt, wild fennel, and hot limestone. Courtyards echo, cicadas scrape lines across the air, and at night the drum begins-low, insistent, like a second heartbeat returning to the body. Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino (CGS) have carried that heartbeat since 1975, when Daniele Durante founded the group as a living archive of village music. In 2007, the baton moved to his son Mauro Durante, and with it a new charge: keep the circle dance alive on modern stages without losing the dust on its shoes.
Released in 2012, Pizzica Indiavolata doesn’t simply “update” tradition. It listens to where pizzica came from-its rooms, its rituals, its ache-and then lets those forces hit the present tense with full velocity.
See also: the cultural and healing background sits in my companion essay, Tarantism: The Dance of Desire and Delirium, which traces how a spider-bite legend, saintly devotion, and music fused into a choreography of catharsis in Apulia.
Where this music comes from
Before it filled festival stages, pizzica was a social technology. The frame drum (tamburello), bowed strings, and voices drew a circle around a person in crisis and moved them-literally-toward release. The logic was incremental: tempo rises, breath follows, color and mode shift, and the knot inside loosens. Whether the “bite” was bodily or symbolic, the cure was communal.
CGS work from that memory. Their sound keeps the downbeat thud and rim-slap spark of the tamburello, the violin’s cut and weep, the handclaps like flint, and then opens the doors to new timbres and collaborators. The result isn’t museum-pure; it is lived music that still knows what bodies are for.
Inside the record: a ritual in chapters
The album unfolds like a night that starts at the threshold and ends in the square.
- The engine: tamburelli interlock in fast 6/8 (that rocking push-pull), carrying unison hooks that crowd voices can answer.
- The lift: organetto and violin spiral upward; guitars and bass give the floor something to trust.
- The breath: ballads and mid-tempo songs punctuate the set, letting the heat radiate, then calling it back.
Standout entry point: “Nu te fermare.”
Its name-“don’t stop”-is programmatic. The track is all forward lean: a drumline that refuses to sit down, violin phrases that feel like they’ve been polished by years of use, and vocals that organize the room into call-and-response. Play it once and the urge to move is not optional.
Other moments to catch:
- Instrumental flights where organetto and fiddle braid a single, shimmering rope.
- Lyrical interludes that prove CGS can sustain stillness without losing tension.
Crossroads rather than features
When Ballaké Sissoko brings the kora, it isn’t a cameo; it’s an axis. West African shimmer threads through Mediterranean pulse, two trance logics nodding to each other. Piers Faccini widens the register on the vocal side-a grain of earth and smoke that sits beautifully against the brighter CGS choruses. Nothing here feels grafted; it’s the same circle, just larger.
Why it still hits
Because the record understands time. It knows the difference between speed and acceleration, between loudness and pressure. It keeps the dance functional-feet first-while letting the arrangements bloom with modern articulation. The grooves are tight, but there’s air around the notes, and the voices sound like people who have sung these refrains with neighbors, not only with microphones.
How to listen
- Give it a room. Even alone with headphones, imagine bodies to your left and right. This is collective music.
- Follow the drum’s grammar. Hear the low center and the bright slap, how they mark steps and spins.
- Track the rise-and-rest. The old therapeutic arc-heat, release, quiet-structures the album.
- Then see it live if you can. The music completes itself in company.
Start here, then go deeper
- First spin: “Nu te fermare.”
- Then choose a crossroads: a track with Sissoko or Faccini to hear how CGS widen the circle.
- For context and history, read Tarantism: The Dance of Desire and Delirium and listen again; you’ll hear the rite inside the arrangement.
Verdict
Pizzica Indiavolata is not nostalgia. It is continuity under voltage-village knowledge carried by a band that knows how to make a plaza out of any room. Put it on, open a window, and let the breeze from the Ionian through the speakers. The dance will find you.
