Fabrizio Poggi is one of Europe’s premier blues musicians. An accomplished harmonica player, Fabrizio is a Grammy Awards nominee, has been twice nominated for Blues Music Awards, and has received the Hohner Lifetime Award. During a long career he has recorded twenty-two albums and has performed in the US and Europe with a who’s who of blues royalty, including the likes of the Blind Boys of Alabama, Mavis Staples, Charlie Musselwhite, Ronnie Earl, John P. Hammond, Marcia Ball, Guy Davis, and Eric Bibb,
He has a new album out called Basement Blues, which culls thirteen songs from his recent archives, including originals and covers of classic blues and gospel songs. It’s a real treat and I was glad to get chatting to Fabrizio recently from his home in Lombardy in the north of Italy.
Gary
Congratulations, Fabrizio, on the new album. It sounds great. Can you tell us a little bit about it because I think a lot of the songs have been recorded some time ago, but you’ve put them together in this great album?
Fabrizio
It all started with my wife Angelina. Last year on Valentine’s Day, she gave me a copy of the The Basement Tapes with Bob Dylan and the band. And she said to me, why don’t you do something like the Basement Tapes? Now of course I can’t do the Basement Tapes! But something started to work. inside my mind and I thought, maybe I have got something in the archives, in my own basement that can be useful <laughs>.
You know, Gary, I don’t like to listen to myself very much, but I listened to some of these older recordings and thought, oh, hey, that isn’t too bad! And I was asking myself why I didn’t put these songs onto a record.
So I discovered that I have a lot of songs that people might like to listen to. And these songs go back 15 years. I have a lot of studio recordings from America. Maybe we were just warming up – we weren’t focused – okay, this is just a warm up, but don’t throw it away. But it’s not for the official record, you know?
So little by little, I had collected a lot of songs and when I went into the studio to put everything together, they sounded OK! I discovered that I’ve got a pretty good record! And my friends, other musicians, people told me these songs aren’t just outtakes. These are songs that deserve to be heard by people that love your music.
Gary
Yeah, they’re all great. I mean, it hangs together as an album really well, actually. And, there are no songs that you wanna skip over and think, no, that’s a bit of a filler. They’re all strong performances.
And you have some excellent collaborators on the album. Obviously, Guy Davis is there, and he always sounds great. But you’ve got Garth Hudson, who played with The Band?
Fabrizio
He was one of the five guys from Canada. This album of mine came from thinking about Bob Dylan and The Band in the woods. And Garth recorded with me on two albums. So I listened to one of the outtakes and it’s interesting because here Garth seems to be playing very freely. So, maybe it’s time to let people listen to it. He is always a genius and all the stuff that he plays on John the Revelator – unbelievable and unexpected!
Gary
You’re right, it does sound fresh. And another musician whose work I enjoyed on the album is your guitarist Enrico Polverari.
Fabrizio
Enrico a very good guitarist, who has been playing with me for 12 years. And he is growing all the time as a musician. On this album he’s playing much more acoustic guitar than before. But speaking of guitarists, we also have Ronnie Earl on electric on two of the songs.
Gary
When you mention Ronnie Earl, Fabrizio, you have played with a great number of other top musicians throughout your career, haven’t you? I mean if you listed them all out, I think anybody’s jaws would drop. They would be going, wow! You’ve had that opportunity, haven’t you?
Fabrizio
Yes. I feel very blessed. You know, a lot of these great musicians I ended up playing with were real heroes for me. So it was really a double treat to me, because the beautiful thing is not only to play with this great musician, but when you play with someone like that, you improve. Sometimes a lot. Just to be in the same room and be jamming together. Something happens inside you and you improve a lot. You grow.
And the other beautiful thing about these experiences is that with most of them, we became friends, like, brothers. Maybe we don’t see each other very often. But in some way, when we reach out to each other it’s like if we’ve just seen each other yesterday.
Gary
Of course, a lot of that is down to your musical expertise. But there’s a lot of that I guess, Fabrizio, is down to your warmth as a person.
Fabrizio
Well, I don’t know. But thank you for the compliment. I always think that the best way to approach other people is always to be honest and transparent. And very respectful.
Especially in the beginning. So, if you act like that, if you don’t pretend to be something else, they can feel it. We maybe were born in different countries, have different languages, different culture, but we have the same emotion. And sometimes these things are easy to share because music really is an international language. So, I don’t know if I have a special talent but everything has come in a very natural way. And don’t forget that, I have to be honest. I have my secret weapon, Angelina!
[Angelina, Fabrizio’s wife, is a very talented photographer and author. Her recently published book, Volevo Fare La Deejay, traces her life from a childhood in rural Italy with very restricted expectations of her, to her life in music along with Fabrizio and her art.]
Gary
Let me ask you this. Of all these musical heroes that you’ve had an opportunity to play with, are there any that stand out for perhaps their warmth in the interaction that you’ve had with them. Are there one or two that are particularly memorable for you?
Fabrizio
It’s easy for me to say people like Guy Davis. I had a good feeling also with Eric Bibb. And, I remember when I met Mavis Staples some twenty years ago, it was so easy and she was so approachable. I remember the two or three times that I met her we chatted about everything for maybe 30 minutes just waiting for the sound check. One time in Lucerne, me and Guy were opening for her. And Guy would always tease me – he said that his soundcheck had to wait because Fabrizio is busy chatting with his Aunt Mavis! <laughs>.
Gary
That’s wonderful. Obviously the album is essentially a blues album, but you started off with a gospel song, Tommy Dorsey’s Precious Lord, Take My Hand. Is that a special song for you, Fabrizio?
Fabrizio
Yes. Very special. And, you know, it’s a very moving story. I read many years ago, how Tommy Dossey came to write Precious Lord. [In 1938, while Dorsey was out of town, his wife died in childbirth and then tragically, their son died hours later. Wracked with grief, Dorsey sat at a piano and wrote the song.]
So, the other night, I dedicated Precious Lord, Take My Hand to my sister. [Fabrizio’s sister passed away very recently at a relatively young age.] We weren’t really thinking of opening the CD with this song, but everyone in the studio, said no, this song has to open the album. And Enrico said our version sounds as if Thomas Dorsey wrote the song in Mississippi!
Gary
Yes, it’s a very bluesy version that you’ve done. And I love the vocals that you have on it. It actually works very well. It’s a really nice arrangement.
Fabrizio
Thank you. In fact, I asked Enrico – don’t play minor chords. Just a few notes to support my harmonica and my talking vocals. Just play as if Son House one day woke up and said, I want to play and sing Precious Lord, Take My Hand. And it seems that people that don’t listen much to gospel or spiritual music like it very much. So I’m very happy.
Gary
I thought it was really interesting that the next song you have is Little Red Rooster, which is with Guy Davis singing and it’s great. But I thought it was really interesting because, in the southern states, they talk about, you know, Saturday night and Sunday morning – singing the Blues on Saturday night, and then singing a hymn on Sunday morning. Well, you’ve kind of reversed it on, on your album. You’ve got Sunday Morning first!
Fabrizio
Oh, yeah! <laughs> That’s perfect, man.
Gary
Now let me ask you about this. There’s one song which is Blues for Charlie. And that’s an instrumental, isn’t it? So, what is that about?
Fabrizio
Charlie is Charlie Musselwhite whom I imitate a little bit. I had two songs that I had given to the Blues Foundation where royalties or sales could be given to poor musicians that live in bad situations. But I had a couple of versions very similar to the ones that were on that CD, where I mixed them a little differently and changed the title and they were perfect. That’s Blues for Charlie and Boogie for John Lee Hooker.
Gary
Fabrizio, obviously these are blues songs. It’s the blues that you mostly play. But you play some gospel as well. But on the last song on the album, there’s a great line that says, if you don’t love the blues, you’ve got a hole in your soul. So why is that? What is it about the blues that is so important to you?
Fabrizio
Well, the blues, to quote Charlie Musselwhite, overtook me when I was a teenager. It’s hard to explain but it was love at the first time. The blues had arrived with Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. But what impacted me was when I went to this little movie theater here in the south of Lombardi, and I saw Muddy Waters and listened to Paul Butterfield on harmonica.
Wow! It was really something, and I said, this is what I want to play. I wanna be like them. “If you don’t like the blues, you have a hole in your soul” was something that I saw written in an old record store in Arkansas. I thought it was a beautiful phrase. Of course, it is a sort of joke, if you don’t like the blues your soul is okay!
So I saw Muddy Water all those years ago playing in the film, The Last Waltz. I had seen the poster which mentioned Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Eric Clapton. Van Morrison. But there were other people I didn’t know at all, like The Band. At a certain point in the concert, Robbie Robertson says, ladies and gentlemen…Muddy Waters. And I saw this old black guy coming on the stage. And all the musicians who are much younger are treating him like the emperor of the world.
And I was wondering, who’s that black man that everyone is treating like a king? And when he started to sing, I said, Oh, now I know, now I understand why they treated him like that!
And then the next day, I went to a record store to buy a harmonica to play the blues. And the man at the store said, I don’t know anything about playing the blues with harmonica! So, I began a journey to find the right instrument. All my friends teased me: You wanna play harmonic, why don’t you play drums or guitar like everyone else? In and around my town, no one played the harmonica. It took me probably six months to figure out which was the right instrument.
And then there’s the question of technique. Of course, nowadays, on Google, you can find tutorials in one second, or less. At that time, I was working as a labourer in a factory. I worked a lot, I ate a lot. I had a lot of anger, a lot of frustration. And when I was listening to a Muddy Waters song, or a John Lee Hooker song, I didn’t understand a word, not even the title of the song. But there was something that in some way seemed connected to my own dissatisfaction.
I felt lonely. All my friends had gone to the university. And I was in a factory working shifts. I was very frustrated. But that’s the magic of the blues. That was 35 or 40 years ago, but it was really another world. So when I started to listen to the blues, I didn’t understand the words. But when I listened to B.B. King or John the Revelator, it didn’t matter. It was something that touched my aching soul. It was enough.
You can have your own lyrics in your mind. The music, the way that the singer sings the song, it’s enough. Of course, if you understand the lyrics it is much better. So at one point I said to myself, okay, Fabrizio, if you like American music, you have to improve your English, because I hadn’t studied English at school. And so I started to translate songs and I started to travel. And of course, the more you travel the more you need to speak English. But that’s how you improve.
Gary
You mentioned getting started with the harmonica, and as you say, you didn’t have YouTube tutorials. You didn’t have Adam Gussow. So how did you learn, how did you learn about sucking and blowing and cross harp and so on? How did you learn all that?
Fabrizio
Well, for six months, I tried to follow the records. Trying to sound bluesy, but it doesn’t work – because I was playing in first position. Then one time I went to a club to listen a local band, and at the end of the show, I got talking to the guitar player. And I told him I had this harmonica, and I said to this guy, I’m quitting. And he told me it doesn’t sound like the blues because you have to play in second position. So, he explained, if the key of the blues song is E you have to use a harmonica in A. So the next day I tried, and although it took me years and years, in some way, I had seen the light.
Gary
Well, are there a couple of harmonica players of the past, or indeed the present, that are your heroes, whose style of playing that you particularly enjoy?
Fabrizio
Well, Charlie Musselwhite has been a great influence. He taught me to experiment, to find my own voice. He was the man. And of course, one month I was listening to James Cotton, the next month Sonny Boy Williamson. And James Cotton has been a big influence on me, and I saw him play live may maybe twelve times.
Gary:
I saw that Basement Blues is in loving memory of Claudio Noseda, who died last year. Tell me about Claudio.
Fabrizio
He was in the band with us for three or four years during the time we recorded Spaghetti Juke Joint. He was a keyboard player, piano player. Very good. And last summer, he left this world. Sadly, he doesn’t appear in any song on the album, but I wanted to pay tribute to him.
Gary
So finally, as you look forward to 2023, Fabrizio, do you have any major tours or festivals or things lined up?
Fabrizio
I would like to go back to the US maybe next fall, and tour with an American musician or maybe just me and Enrico. In April, I have a short tour in Belgium and Holland. This past year was pretty tough because in February I lost my mother and then I lost my sister. But I’m very happy Basement Blues has reached a lot of people and I’ve had a lot of compliments – which I’ve really needed. I’m very happy because a lot of people have contacted me on WhatsApp or Facebook, saying I bought the record and I’m really enjoying it.
Gary
It’s a great achievement. You should be very proud. Thank you, Fabrizio.
Basement Blues is on the Appaloosa Records label and is available to stream on Amazon, Apple and the other streaming services. The CD version can be obtained from the shop at Appaloosa Records at https://www.appaloosarecords.it/shop/Fabrizio-Poggi-Basement-Blues-p510970164