Kalàscima Featuring Andrea Ramolo (ITALY)

Kalàscima is one of Italy’s hottest and most innovative bands, meshing traditional dance music known as Taranta and the corresponding ancient ritual of pizzica tarantata with global styles like Balkan, klezmer, Celtic and electronica. Its six members – musicians in some of Europe’s finest orchestras such as L'Orchestra Popolare La Notte della Taranta – are friends from Salento (in the southern Italian sub-peninsula of Apulia) who grew up together playing and singing their region’s hypnotic melodies and rhythms and have since reinvented this tradition with a mix of electronics, lysergic beats, original melodies and folk atmospheres. When ancient meets modern, the result is explosive, generating a potent form of trance.

Kalàscima features many fascinating traditional instruments (bagpipe, traditional flutes, Italian organetto), a spectacular array of percussion from southern Italy and beyond (riqq, darbuka etc.), modern instruments such as the bass guitar and loop machine, and thrilling vocals. The ensemble has a large international fan base across Australia, Canada, USA, Ecuador, China, South Korea, India, Japan, Europe and elsewhere. K, released in October of 2018, is Kalàscima’s most recent (third) album and a follow-up to 2014’s Psychedelic Trance Tarantella, which catapulted the band onto the international stage and was nominated for several prestigious awards, including a Premio Tenco.

For this tour, Kalàscima has joined forces with Andrea Ramolo, a Toronto-based singer-songwriter and multiple Canadian Folk Music Award nominee. Andrea began her journey into the arts as a dancer and actor, then ventured into music with the release of her 2008 album, Thank You For The Ride, and now has a total of six recordings. Born in Toronto to Italian immigrants, Andrea comes from a close-knit family with strong female role models: her mom (who beat cancer twice), and her grandmothers, who celebrated and encouraged hard work, strength and perseverance.