Umberto "Gionni Chesc" Fracassi

Homemade Blues, by chance..
Here you find some attempts to face some great tunes, in part from Rev. Gary Davis' monumental work, from Bob Dylan's "The Freewheelin'..", from the Unplugged album by Eric Clapton - an attempt originally meant to listen to my own faulty technique and possibly straighten it out.. But then it turned out to be something unexpected for me.. Read on, if you're curious..
It’s clear by now, isn’t it? Of course, I am no professional musician – rather, and much more simply, an aficionado whose good lil’ heart always beats in 4/4 and 12 beats.. Since the good ol’ days, music has been underpinning my day, setting its pace and style and, not seldom, stressing some gestures, some dramatic moments.. I certainly listen to so much music but blues is the only thing I can try to grasp, with a carload of energy and passion. Were I objectively as capable a guitarist as I'd love to be, it would be all evident and I wouldn’t feel the urge to jot these lines to explain what the hell I am doing here in the Music channel of MySpace.. However, here comes to you a short story on how I ended up here. After all, all I wanted was just to play my guitar..
If numbers were crucial, in line of principle I’ve been strumming since I was 8 (I was born back in the days of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon) but my “glory days” (shall we name them as such..?) date back to the early 1980’s.. I then suddenly halted it all – it can happen when you’re 16.. And it took a long while before I restarted with some determination, once I bought a new guitar – one of those rough yet trustworthy ones.. But the dramatic time came when I attended a concert by John Hammond in Porretta Terme, in the early 1990’s. When I looked for him in the backstage to know him and to let him know how his music had hit a chord within me, he shook my hand and said: “Blues is all my life, I wouldn’t know what else to do”.. Here you see what a glimpse of music can do to the eyes of that wrinkled boy I had in front of me. Here on MySpace I had the honor of thanking him for what he had unknowingly done for me. Long Live the Blues, John..
Back in the spring of 1997, during a memorable visit to that guitar temple of Andy’s Guitar Workshop on Denmark St. in London, I bought a beautiful Epiphone replica of the Gibson J200. The look was very close to the original and magnificent and, for those days, it was much more than enough. After all, a few steps from me, there you had an awkward Keith Richards strumming on some gem, worth at least ten times my new baby. Above all, there was an unparalleled Gibson J185 of 1969, original finish, its top creased by endless cracks (in a radial pattern, as if they were fingers of a hand) caused by the million notes that Queen must have played. That day became one of those you treasure and tell over and over, like I am doing right now..
In 2005, a double meeting, here in Rome, changes it all again. That replica of the J200 deserved to be changed.. I face my wallet and go to YourMusic shop.. and there I fish a gracious Taylor 310. A good guitar, yes, but there’s no feeling sparking – she’s too.. to the millimeter. With one more leap forward (money-wise too, but..), in September 2007, I revolve the full lot: style, outlook, attempts.. We were talking about Gibsons, remember? We were talking blues roots, weren’t we? Are we dealing or not with chain gang, long train coming, times they are a-changin’..? So, there were no alternatives. I got back to YourMusic – I knew she was there: a Gibson Advanced Jumbo , second-hand, a replica of the 1936 model. She’s a princess, yet one of those in the know of the third class: she’s got some scratches, some tracks of a raw usage, frets await some repair.. but she’s got a magnificent voice, she was conceived for anything happening among Route 66 and Memphis, a train and a slab of fried chicken, with Polk Salad Annie in the background (“..where the alligators live only”). And the sheer volume of this Gibson baby leads to Leadbelly and to Rev. Gary Davis.
In this space you can find some tunes that, with a Mac laptop and a condenser microphone in the studio and in my living room, I have “recorded”, at first simply to listen back to my playing errors and wrong licks – all of them innumerable. I certainly had no idea I would have had the face to put them online – but several unexpected and tasty changes seem to take place, so it might be worth seeing what happens now.. Of course, the guitar you listen to is the same Gibson I was mentioning earlier on and that you can see pictured in this space. Needless to say - she outnumbers me by any respects.. In some other tunes, I am using a very good Tanglewood TW55-FPP . My only afterthought was - and still is - that these versions, somewhat “low, down & dirty” (that’s what my technique allows me as of today..), are light years away from giving due justice to the original tunes.. I started up with that beautiful album by Eric Clapton (Unplugged, of course).. and let’s hope Eric would graciously forgive me.. As I’ll finish some other tunes and “polish” these ones now online, I shall publish them here.
Let me end this “open letter” with a consideration, on an entirely personal level. It makes quite an impression on me (and a tender one too, I have to say) to write openly about my “musical CV”.. as if these lines were a coming-of-age novel, as if they had been written by Cameron Crowe for “Almost Famous” – a guy who knows what Rock really is about since age 15.. Since September 2006 I have unexpectedly and surprisingly undergone a sudden leap forward on all that has to do with music and in which I am involved, at any length. In October 2007 I opened my private profile on MySpace for mere practical reasons (having a living calendar of the blues venues and keeping track of the concerts of some blues bands here in Rome).. and now, maybe unconsciously, here am I telling a story about Umberto the “musician”.
And, are you wondering where the name of the “Umberto the musician” comes from? Simple and straight: the great Johnny Cash – spelled as we pronounce it and written as if it were an Italian name. My true one, rather unappealingly, is Umberto Fracassi. Have you ever heard of a wanna-be bluesman called Umberto? Come on, I needed some fancy name..
Gionni Chesc Plays The Blues!
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