Riccardo Tesi (diatonic accordeon)
Maurizio Geri (guitar, voice)
Riccardo Tesi and Maurizio Geri both, but separately, begin their career as musicians in the groups of Caterina Bueno, singer and epic researcher of Tuscan folk music. Both from Pistoia, their paths soon cross, and “Banditaliana” is born, one of the leading groups of Italian world music, which has played all over the world in the twenty five years of its existence.
While independently accumulating experience in the most diverse fields – Tesi has played with both popular and jazz musicians, with singers and fingerstyle guitarists, Geri has deepened the technique of guitar playing and popular singing, participating in swing-manouche music – the two combine together original common projects, such as Acqua Foco e Vento (2003), entirely dedicated to traditional Tuscan music, and Sopra i tetti di Firenze (2010), an award-winning homage to their mentor Caterina.
In the face of all this, it was inevitable that Tesi and Geri take advantage of their formidable musical and human chemistry by performing in a duo, a formation in which they can best pursue what for years has been their shared artistic goal: to bring to bloom the flowers of a modern popular music starting from those traditional seeds that they gathered together with Caterina Bueno.
To do this, Tesi brings all he was able to reap from more than thirty years of career, by experimenting on his melancholy and wistful diatonic accordion. Geri joins his side with a clear and polyhedral guitar, but also with a vibrant and expressive voice. Together, ranging from traditional music to jazz, through gypsy rhythms and songwriting, drawing on the most beautiful pearls of a vast repertoire that have led the world in twenty years of artistic activity, Tesi and Geri offer forward looking music, well aware of what lies behind it, that allowed it to exist: a music that is Contemporary Tradition.