FANTASTIC NEGRITO
Winner of 3 Grammy Awards in 2016, 2018 and 2021 for Best Contemporary Blues Album, Fantastic Bold arrives at the 31st Pordenone Blues Festival to present his new album “White Jesus Black Problems”.
Showman of irresistible intensity, Fantastic Negrito is the incarnation of a musician who returned to the world after having gone through countless difficulties, and in his pieces the story is as important as the sound: songs born from a long and troubled life conveyed by typically roots based on slide guitar, drums and piano. Fantastic Negrito is the story of a man who fought to make it, only to lose everything and work his way back from the bottom.
Returning to music in 2014 playing on the streets of Oakland, Fantastic Negrito won the first contest to participate in the well-known NPR Tiny Desk format. In 2016 he released his first full length “The Last Days of Oakland”, which earned him his first Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2017 which was then repeated in 2019 with his album “Please Don't Be Dead” ( Cooking Vinyl, 2018). His third work “Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?” came out during the summer of 2020.
SUGAR BLUE
The “King of Harmonica Blues” continues his artistic journey without borders, presenting “The Colors of Blues”: a new musical adventure by the New York harmonica player, considered a true journey towards the land of his roots and his deepest identity. deep of the Blues, Africa, where everything started, to look at the future with gratitude and new enthusiasm.
Sugar Blue live at Pordenone Blues & Co. Festival will be an immersive show, an occasion in which the classics of the African-American tradition will be reinterpreted, along with new arrangements of original compositions, intense and exciting warhorses of the artist's repertoire; he will be accompanied by an exceptional quartet - Damiano Della Torre (piano and organ), Ilaria Lantieri Whiting (bass and vocals), Sergio Montaleni (vocals, guitar), CJ Tucker (drums) and Solo Diabate (balafon and djembe).
GRAYSON CAPPS
On the Park stage San Valentino In addition to Sugar Blue and Fantastic Negrito, the excellent storyteller Grayson Capps will perform: author of that “A Love Song for Bobby Long” which closed the film of the same name with John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson, an artist now very popular in Italy.
It will be a full band formation, which will see our "local" friend J. Sintoni on electric guitar, and a female rhythm section with Grayson's daughter, Sadie Morningstar on bass and Angelica Comandini on drums. Stories of real, wild life, between Alabama and New Orleans, and funny and picturesque stories like the characters told in his songs, in a sound mix of Delta blues, rural folk and the allegorical contamination of Louisiana.
