Stelvio Cipriani - Marea

With the advent of jazz during the 1920s, the popularity of the banjo declined. It was replaced by tenor banjos and plectrum banjos, and, with the advent of big band jazz, microphones, and pickups during the 1930s, by the guitar. The two principal blues banjoists to record, Papa Charlie Jackson from New Orleans and Gus Cannon from Mississippi, were bridging the gap between the nineteenth century songsters tradition and the country blues. Both musicians used the crossed notes technique involving returning to a chord, to facilitate finger picking patterns. In Jackson’s work, especially in his links between choruses, some of the fingering patterns that later emerged in the jazz playing of Lonnie Johnson are identifiable.

The decline of the five string banjo by the early twentieth century in America must have left countless banjos and banjo like instruments unused, a source of supply through junk and pawn shops for poor people who, for little cash investment, could experiment with such instruments and add them to their music making traditions.

During the late 1940s a new interest in folk music began that carried well into the early 1970s and was sparked by the civil rights movement in the South and the war in Vietnam. Seeger and Scruggs both introduced technological changes to the banjo and reaffirmed the role of the banjo in traditional and folk music after World War II. The tenor banjo also reemerged during the 1940s with the revival of traditional jazz. The banjo continued to be an almost exclusively white instrument.

Source: Encyclopedia of the blues by Edward Komara

Stelvio Cipriani - Marea

• Released on: Travel On a Melody (Romantic Music to Relax Together) album
• Release Date: May 15 2014
• Genre: Easy Listening, Light Music

"An Italian composer, mostly of motion picture soundtracks and pianist. Stelvio Cipriani became prolific in the Italian film world and was awarded a Nastro d'Argento for Best Score for The Anonymous Venetian in 1970."

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