Siena Jazz remembers Alessandro Giachero one year after his death
Thursday 21 October at 3pm at the headquarters of Siena Jazz at the Fortress of Siena there will be a ceremony in memory of Alessandro Giachero, one year after his untimely and sudden death. The ceremony, reserved for reasons for measures to counter the pandemic emergency, will be attended by, in addition to the President of the Siena Jazz Association, Giannetto Marchettini, the Artistic Director Franco Caroni and the teaching and non-teaching staff of the Jazz University of which Giachero he was first a student and then a teacher, his wife Anna Sanasi, his son Samuel, his parents Eva and Giorgio and some friends.
On this occasion, the plaque in his memory and the classroom that was named after him will be discovered, room number 15 where Alessandro held his lessons, communicating his talent with passion, commitment and dedication.
The two will also be presented Scholarships that Siena Jazz has dedicated to his name, which will allow two guitarists of the Biennium, Federico Carnevali and Ruggero Fornari, to attend the lessons of the Permanent Laboratory of Musical Research, directed by Stefano Battaglia, who was Alessandro’s teacher and great friend. Franco Caroni Alessandro remembers: “One year after his sudden death, Alessandro’s presence is still very strong at Siena Jazz, the Targa and the classroom in his name will serve to get to know students and musicians who have not had the opportunity to meet him. We miss every day the magnificent musician, the pianist, the composer and improviser, the teacher, but above all the wonderful person he was for those who had the good fortune to know him.“
This is the thought of Stefano Battaglia one year after the death of Alessandro Giachero: “Whoever chooses to make music in a certain way lives suspended exploring the mystery, digging with his bare hands in the darkness to find the necessary light for himself and for those who follow him, or are next to him. And this determines a certain loneliness, which at times seems bitter, at other times very sweet. Meeting musicians like Alessandro, having the honor of participating in his musical knowledge and flowering, and then together with him build a community of musicians around a reference structure such as Siena Jazz has been and is, embodies a strong and balmy wind that sweeps all loneliness. And his irreplaceable contribution offered in these classrooms through music, which is also full of community values and generous availability, is more and more tangible with each passing day. A musical institution like ours, where talents, dreams, psychologies, motivations are managed, the most important figures are those who put the doing before being, the us over the ego, knowing well that over time it is precisely through doing that the ‘to be’ to be alone by participating is revealed in the construction of a community, loneliness is forever undermined. The strength to do is love, devotion to music. Through the many years of work shared, side by side, Alessandro and I have an almost tribal belonging, in this sense. We were looking for the magic of sounds from the same instrument, we spoke the same language. And this makes the solitude of music a dance, an even privileged condition, a complicity. And that love and devotion like a living substance gives me joy. His presence did not go away for a moment. We need these anniversaries to stop and listen to it in silence, to remember also to the outside, inside and outside the tribe, the good substance that it has produced. Alessandro is one of the figures who determined the identity of the entire structure, lighting the way for many young people and colleagues, marking the path for the decades to come. Beauty that is broken, or interrupted, always appears terrible to our eyes, in some cases even unbearable. The untimely death of Alessandro, still one year old today, left a distance of suspension, around the depth of pain processing, which reminds us once again how much his existence was concretely accomplished regardless of its duration, precisely through the values of sense and meaning that he managed to convey. And paradoxically, precisely his lack, his absence, has become a very strong presence, bringing out even more the richness of his doing and of his being, a legacy of joy and light for all of us and for his beautiful family, his wife Anna and his son Samuel. “