**ABOUT RAY TARANTINO**
Saxophone for the cows, songs and guitar for the hiding, words for a cause.
Q:Does Ray play the sax now?
A:No he doesn't!
A thirteen year old boy blasting Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street sax riff to an audience of at least two hundred cows is possibly the most recusant of all rock and roll clichés. It happened in the very green and British Dorset - it happened in 1989 - and that’s where it all began: “I knew I could connect to the audience, those cows were chasing me every time I walked their fields, but after just a couple of shows and some well-placed tunes I had a few friends I could rely on. I could walk safe. A lot of people are killed every year by raging cattle, it seems strange but its true.”
Those dairy mammals would have been proud to see Ray reach a #2 position within the MySpaceUK “Top Artists Charts”, sign a good deal and set up a good band just to be ready to approach the world again. Again?
Let’s rewind to dig it all.
Ray Tarantino was born in Italy. His Sicilian-diamond-dealer-father (really) and old-school-Tuscan-countess mother were terrified by the hypothesis of seeing their son dodging snapped guitar strings and spiralling drugs on stage, and so Ray kept his secret well treasured and conformed to necessities for as long as he had to.
Year were passing, the fog was rising and fellow teenagers were busy smoking dried banana skins, exploring sex or gambling; some spent days playing bizarre ball games that needed big open spaces and some were heading for an accidentally prosperous future. Ray did all the same – maybe heading for a different kind of prosperity - but took a short path to experience by diving head first into what he felt was the beginning and end of it all: incessantly projecting visions of Dylan recording Blood On The Tracks; constantly searching for Daniel Lanois’ efforts to craft what became the U2 sound and the beauty captured by The Joshua Tree; regularly intertwining melodic phrases into Dire Straits’ strategically pure Brothers In Arms; hazily floating within the omniscient flavour of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here while jibing to the vibe of Curtis Mayfield’s masterpiece There’s No Place Like America Today; and last but not least, intimately daydreaming of the day he could have performed to a predominantly human audience.
The world kept changing and so did Ray. He needed money and so he worked, he was asked to provide a social reason to be world-worthy and so he found it, at one point reaching the status of what he refers to as the socially-platinum package: “I had a job that paid for my DVD player and huge-but-always-off TV, a woman that paid for my milk, good friends that paid for my beer and I had a business card too, one with four colour print on both sides. Everyone was really proud of me, it was great. There were six-billion people at the time on the planet and five-billion-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine were happy for me, I somehow seemed to be the only one left out of the loop, as if everyone was smoking weed and I was the one inhaling Chanel. I felt I had to do something about it. It was all passively funny but right on the edge of being realistically tragic.”
Quoting the computer-generated voice that’s hardly audible in the mix of the very last song of Ray’s debut album: after all, the point is that the limit of the achievable isn’t different from the limit of the conceivable, bearing in mind that a man must evolve when given a chance to.
There are times dedicated to thought, and there are times dedicated to action, and it only takes an instant for things to change.
Day one of the said chance - five o’clock in the morning - a 100mph car crash on the highway seems to set all the priorities straight. The end of the end, or maybe, the beginning: there was no room left for business talk and late night meetings, no more oxygen for the guy wearing a suit.
“Crying out to your entire hemisphere that you are giving up what’s always being known to be your life for something that they regard as the absurd is pretty extreme” - says Ray – “like walking up to your father telling him that from next Monday you’ll have dark hair, dark skin, you’ll stick to Kosher diet and you’ll move to London to live with your gay boyfriend. And that on top of that you’ll change your name from Frederick Hitler to Jeanette Churchill.” But the six-foot-two singer songwriter - with over 180 songs in his pockets - smiles, admitting that his imagination might have gone further than reality, although “there was a major shock anyhow, it was a life-changing decision, and like all major shocks this one brought a lot of pain mixed with doses of joy and relief, and it all gave birth to that song.” What song?
Recusant is that song, the title track from Ray Tarantino’s debut album (co-produced by Simply Red cofounder and former bass player Tony Bowers).
The album Recusant contains ten well written songs, crafted in conjunction to the distinctive quality of the Anglo-American singer/songwriter-rock custom. It delivers a complete work that has gifted Ray with a #2 spot in the MySpace top-artist UK charts, a world-wide deal with Sony Music Publishing, a past forty-shows European tour and a current twenty-five-shows East Coast promo tour, more than 300.000 MySpace plays, initial AAA non-commercial airplay and a boosting drive to “write ’till I die.”
“Recusant is not really about the sound. Everyone now is looking for the sound but I can hardly tell the difference between a chorus and a flanger, maybe I don’t really care. I like songs, and so I try to write songs, that’s what the album is about. I think I know where the good performance is, where the outstanding song-writing is, and I’m glad to say I know exactly where I am in regards to all that. If I had to be honest the title of this album would have been something along the lines of… before you buy this, make sure you’ve spent money on all these, and then a long list of titles. But I’ve found my fitting shape at last, and this is what I do.”
**ABOUT RECUSANT**
Album Review:
"There are some records you addicted to with just one play. They get beneath your skin, act like a plaid laid on your legs on a cold wintery night. Ray Tarantino’s “Recusant” is that kind of album. Amazing to think that the 31 years-old Anglo Italian songwriter is moving through his debut with such work: his songs are mature, intense, incredibly vibrant. The hoarse voice of someone who smokes too many cigarettes and possibly loves to love women; a “rock” sound which floats across sharp songs and delicate ballads, revealing what seems to be constantly inspired and honest song writing. Lyrics that hit like a punch or reach out for the smoothest corner of the heart, words that are kept hanging in between poetry and intimacy.
As for the best Anglo American pop rock custom, Ray Tarantino knows how to move feelings with no use of conceptualisms. His songs could get you stuck on a radio frequency, or glued onto the scenes of a stage in a smoky club, some of it could easily be a good movie's soundtrack.
“Recusant”, “So Easy”, “Gypsy Acrobat”, “Alibis And Crimes”, “Into The End”, the delicate “Some Kind Of Sweet Love”, “Summer Space”: its hard to find the best tracks.
This is one of those records that you’ll love to listen from beginning to end, and when it'll be over, you'll press play again. Because it'll be cold again."
(Album review written by Ross @ Radio105)
-album contains booklet with full lyrics-
Instruments played:
Acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, bass, double bass, rhodes, hammond, piano, synth, harmonica, indian flute.
Produced by: Ray Tarantino & Tony Bowers
** ON RECUSANT **
"There's a fortune teller in Northern France, she once told me that I was going to record an album with two friends. One of them she said was a bass player, and the other one was - according to her - a keyboard player. I didn't know any keyboard players able to record on an album a the time. She said it was going to be a good album because it was going to be played with good hearted people. It felt like fiction at first.
Two years later I was in the studio with good friend Tony on bass and new friend Luca Chiaravalli on fender rhodes (among other greatly talented musicians). During a break Tony reminded meof the fortune teller.
For the recording period I was staying in a hotel, and in that room overlooking the fields I wrote 7 of the 10 songs that are now in the album. I used to meet the band in the morning, play them the new song. Then we used to play it together for a couple of hours to get "its own sound" and then we'd tape it. Live, one song a day. As live as it could be.
It has been a great experience to pass my songs onto those guys, see them approach each single one as if they were young ladies, with respect and patience, and then slowly see them turn them into mature and serene women. The band was a good band, and this is a band album No player was around just to kill time." (Ray)
** LIVE **
Ray Tarantino is now on tour on the East Coast fo the States with his band:
Miles Kennedy - drums
Steve Shebby - bass guitar
Alex Magneto - guitars
Visit www.myspace.com/raytarantino to see the updated tour info.
You might find his name on the bill!
Read more...