Thirty-four years ago I held my first concert in Rome. It was in a club that no longer exists, it was called “Il Castello”. Just over one hundred people were present. Even though it wasn’t a presentation to the press and there was no piece to write, Ernesto was also among those hundred souls.
Then, if I remember correctly, he wrote the piece anyway but that’s not the point: the point is that he was there simply because… yes. Because music was such a passion that even if he hadn’t been a music journalist, he would have found a way to live it every day on every possible occasion.
Luckily, however, he was a music journalist to the fullest. And, anyone who knew him knows, all the way with a smile.
Because among tens of thousands of albums listened to, I don’t know how many concerts seen and reviewed, requests for pieces and favours, the desk first covered with vinyl, then with cassettes, then with CDs and now the computer packed with audio files, Ernesto, there in the middle, he always held the ball. With the needle of his compass moved by his taste, by his inexhaustible curiosity and, even more, by the joy of being in the music, touching it, trying to hold it, getting into it as much as he could and feeling it on him and talking about it and discussing it and falling in love, which I know, the Lemonheads or Sufjan Stevens or a thousand others. The smile, I was saying, of someone who has perhaps never fully understood – because it is too good to be true – to be able to turn their passion into a job. Of those who have seen so many that they are ready with the first Roman “aho” to dismantle anyone who was trying to pass off some rubbish. An “aho”, however, always equally expressed with the benevolence and elegance of that smile. The smile, always the same, of someone who has never needed to appear conceited because he knew he knew. And he knew that lightness is a form of respect for both light and heavy music.
I will really miss all our musical discussions but even more the smile that accompanied them.
He will be missed by anyone else who loves music and knows they have lost someone who could guide them with the discretion of a suggestion.
And she knew how to do it because music, in turn, loved her unconditionally to the core.
2024-02-26 21:21:07
#Luciano #Ligabue #Ernesto #Assantes #lightness #respecting #music