Justin Adams & Mauro Durante

An intense, hypnotic meeting between southern Italian dance music and blues. Imagine Salento, the heel of the Italian boot, surrounded by the Mediterranean on three sides. Here people have danced pizzica for generations, a repetitive tarantella closely linked to tarantism, a possession ritual that survived well into the latter half of the 20th century, in the midst of a Catholic Europe. Music as medicine, dance as liberation. Mauro Durante grew up in this music. Then Justin Adams. He grew up in the Middle East, was shaped by punk and dub, produced Tinariwen and played with Robert Plant. Where Mauro Durante carries the traditions of Salento in his body, Adams has immersed himself in the rhythms of North and West Africa and the raw, old blues recordings of the 1920s. They met in 2011 at the La Notte della Taranta festival in Salento. Adams was a guest, Durante an assistant to Ludovico Einaudi. They played together before they had really spoken. Ten years later, with the pandemic closing concert halls and stranding two traveling musicians in their respective home towns, the collaboration became a duo. The album Still Moving (2021) took its title from a song about migration, inspired by the Odyssey. At the same time it meant something simpler: we are still alive, and we are still moving. At first Adams thought they would need to bring in a bassist or a drummer. Then they realized that two were enough. He thought of the old delta blues records and of Greek recordings from the same era, where often one or two instruments could carry an entire world. It is not about playing as little as possible, but about making every sound count. As he himself puts it: "It doesn't sound small. It doesn't sound weak. It doesn't sound impossible to dance to." Now they follow up with Sweet Release, recorded live, with room for improvisation, and with guests such as Alessia Tondo, Yousra Mansour and CBGB legend Felice Rosser. Neither of them claims to have planned any bridge between pizzica, desert blues and punk. They play what they love, and let others draw the connections. "Adams' guitar burns like a torch in the middle of the night," writes The Times. "Maury's voice channels the voices of the ancestors." Justin Adams & Mauro Durante play at Cosmopolite on 9 April 2027. It will be hypnotic and raw, and meant to move body and soul.