Jack Jastelli, walking with songs, without running
There is a title that already tells a world alone: “Mariachi Desperado Running Club”. An apparently contrasting, but deeply personal for Jack Jastelli image.
“It’s a title that made me smile as soon as I thought of it.
And when one thing makes me smile and moves something inside me, I usually follow it. The mariachi have always fascinated me: they play for others, for those who cannot speak. They bring music to the strong moments of life. Desperado is the wandering part, a little lonely. It is Running Club ‘is an ironic reference, because I started running just after an emotionally difficult period. But I’m not a runner: I’m one who runs ‘Slow and Furious’. The title is all this together. Pain, lightness, path, self -irony. “.
The return to music
It is the title of the EP that marks the return to the music of the singer -songwriter, who in recent years has written documentaries and a book and has dedicated himself to the teaching of Mindfulness. It contains four songs in the studio and as many in their live version recorded at the Cross Studios in Milan, plus an unpublished for the live set, “The LightHouse”. The disc is a collection of songs that alternate English and Italian, continuing a stylistic figure that Jaselli has been cultivating for some time between songwriting and rock, but which today lives in a different way.
“Let’s say that now I don’t ask myself too much,” he says about the duality between singing in English as the opening track “Wandering Soul” and most of his first production, and the Italian of the other songs.
“And it’s much more fun. In a certain sense, I let the song to decide. English has always been my starting musical language: I grew up, it comes natural to me. But I am falling in love with the Italian, or maybe I am just learning to live it better. It is more direct, more to skin. He leaves you less alibi, but every now and then I am surprised with a force that I did not see before. Starting in English and ending up in Italian, or vice versa, without forcing.
“Wandering Soul” is the only previous song, the first song released and already present in the documentary “Tratti” by Francesco Frank Fight. “Frank’s call came a little surprise, but it was one of those moments that make you say: ‘Ok, it is the right time to write again in English’. I hadn’t done it for a while, and instead everything happened fluid. The documentary tells a very human journey, made of errors, research, change – and in a certain sense it is the same emotional ground on which the whole disc moves.”
The sound that comes by itself
The sound of “Mariachi Desperado Running Club” is the result of a slow process, made more than a walk than a race, and born from the collaboration with Davide Ferrario.
“Without haste, and with great trust.
With Davide we found ourselves immediately: he has a very musical, very human way of working. He helped me to bring out the most authentic part of these songs, without pigeonholing them. We started from voice and guitar versions, scarne. Then we let each song guiding us: some traces only needed air and silence, others asked us layers of sound. Choirs, synth just mentioned, and reverberations as long as the desert. We also used slide guitars to give that suspended, almost cinematographic flavor. We did not be interested in chasing a trendy or modern sound at all costs’. We wanted it to be beautiful, interesting, and above all true. And in that process, the sound came from itself. But it came right. “
Just this research is what Jastelli pushed to publish the live versions.
“Even if you play the same notes, it is never the same thing. In the studio you can build, file, stratify. Live there is risk, the air, the tremolium. The audience … They are two completely different experiences, but both true. I wanted them to live together, that the body of the disc could be felt, but also its breath. We have also chosen to record a live version on video to declare a very simple thing, but I want to bring back to me in the way to report these. Giro, live. Because for me the live is the soul of music.
Make music listening
In recent years, Jack’s artistic journey has been intertwined with very different experiences: Mindfulness, teaching, work with the inmates of the Judician women’s prison that became a documentary for Discovery, travels transformed into narratives (“I go home on foot”, another documentary and book that tells the musical tour made on foot for 800 km along the Via Francigena with backpack and guitar).
“I try to make sure that there is no clear distinction between the things I do.
Music, writing, the practice of Mindfulness, work with people – even in prison – and academic one: for me they are all part of the same direction. It is not that I take a concept and I put it in music, but certain experiences – a heartfelt word, a gesture seen, a shared silence – seduce, and then re -emerge in the form of sound. I think it’s all connected. More than a message to transmit, perhaps it is a quality of the gaze. “
This approach, explains Jastelli, “allowed me to return to music after a moment of disappointment, of disenchantment. It helped me to recover, with more clarity, what really matters for me in music: authenticity, contact, essentiality. Not perfection, not approval, not the ‘image’. Over the years I understood that if I chase only the external part of this career – the discs, the concerts – What do I work with Mindfulness, with prison, with writing, he always brings me back to a different rhythm. sing.”
Walk with songs
The idea of making music without haste is the heart of Jastelli’s approach to this ep. “In a sense, it means to trust. Not having the urgency to publish, to be there. Let a song have its time, even if it takes years to come to good. Do not chase the novelty, but being close to something that is not immediately ready … and that’s okay. Making music without haste, for me, is a way not to betray the initial intention. It is a gesture of love towards the songs. Something was really left to mature. “
An approach that Jastelli wants to bring to the future: “breathe, continue writing, play. And to carry on all that world a little strange and a little my fact of music, places, listening, stories, movement. I do not have a precise plan, but I know that I want to bring these songs live as much as possible. The live for me is the truest place: every time different, every time fragile, every time I live. Listen. And that thing, when it happens, practically everything is worthwhile.
