Michele Gazich can not be defined in one word: he is a musician, composer, songwriter and music producer. He is, perhaps before all that, a violinist. He developed a recognizable and personal style with his violin and he takes it through all his roamings.
He was born in 1969 in Brescia, Lombardia, but he travelled the world and since early 90s, playing in orchestras and chamber music groups, with singer songwriters and performing his own songs: a wanderer of music, we might call him. His valuable international and multicultural experience is shown on more than fifty albums and he claims collaborations with masters of folk, blues and alternative country like Eric Andersen, Mary Gauthier, Tom Russell, John Hammond, Victoria Williams, Michelle Shocked and Mark Olson.
This polyhedral character also taught music at University and composed music for theatres. He constantly experiments new ways of playing music and the results can be seen in his albums: the most famous are “La Nave dei Folli” (The Ship of Fools), “Dieci Esercizi per Volare” (Ten exercises to fly), “L’Imperdonabile” (The Unforgivable), “Una storia di mare e di sangue” (A Tale of Sea and Blood). The last mentioned album carries a personal burden: its notes tell about the tales of migration of his own family and the on going issue of migration, so actual and vivid nowadays, is also the main topic of the recent album “La Via del Sale” (the Road of Salt). In this album the musician combines archaic instruments with voices with techniques of the present, interlacing the past and the modern times, in order to narrate the new European metaphorical “Vie del Sale”, that is to say the new paths of migration.
He’s been esteemed so far the contemporary personification of the errant Jewish, in constant search of our origins and leitmotifs. And we like to see him this way.
Waterlines Project 