Roberto Laneri

Il polistrumentista Roberto Laneri si ripresenta con due album registrati rispettivamente nel 1998 e in un arco temporale che va dal 2014 al 2018. Ma procediamo con ordine. “Musica finta / Bluesprints”, registrato come si diceva nel 1998 ma pubblicato solo nei primi mesi del 2020, va inquadrato correttamente grazie al sottotitolo “A Study in Metamusicology”. Si tratta, cioè, di un album assai complesso, di lettura difficile, in cui Laneri – come egli stesso afferma, suonando al sax soprano alcuni rags di Scott Joplin ha provato ad introdurre dei cambiamenti nel testo, dapprima minimi, poi sempre più articolati, fino ad arrivare alla composizione di pezzi autonomi e paralleli, da suonarsi assieme ai pezzi originali. “L’effetto di questa estremizzazione – aggiunge Laneri – è paragonabile alle prospettive impossibili di Escher, oppure ai disegni tridimensionali generati al computer, dai quali possono emergere immagini complementari eppur assai diverse da quelle immediatamente apparenti”. Fin qui le premesse metodologiche. Ma il risultato musicale? Laneri presenta composizioni originali, unite a quelle di Schumann, Schubert ma anche Joplin e Jelly Roll Morton. Quindi linguaggi differenti ricondotti ad unità per una sorta di opera di ampio respiro divisa in cinque capitoli. Per questa impresa Laneri (sax soprano, sampling e sound treatment) ha chiamato accanto a sé la pianista Maria Jolanda Masciovecchio e Alana Ferry come spoken voice. 
(A PROPOSITO DI JAZZ, di Gerlando Gatto, maggio 2022)

Some day will come when no one will be writing new music, and composers will add notes to pre-existing scores. The Apocalypse is still far away, but Roberto Laneri-composer and instrumentalist, overtone singing pioneer- prophesizes it and creates the future to come looking at the remote past, the medieval musica ficta. With the help of his soprano saxophone, Laneri has applied this practice to none other than Franz Schubert. …not variations as such, but rather “extensions” of the pre-existing harmonic-rhythmic space, projections into the now. 
(L’Unità, 7.05.1997)

The most original concerts of the entire festival are in fact definable as a true revisitation of works from the great chamber music repertoire… artistic director Roberto Laneri’s (who opened the festival on saxophone) has actually been something more than that. …Roberto Laneri has realized a true counterpoint which cannot be defined as improvisation, since everything is written, studied and thoroughly practice. Laneri great experience and mastery have made this courageous project convincing from and exquisitely musical standpoint. Speaking in practical terms, it is a path which unfolds gradually, “intersecting” more and more deeply very far genres, styles and sounds, little by little leading us to understand (or better still, to “feel”) the roots and reasons of jazz, a musical tradition which Laneri considers, and rightly so, “memories of a music which has changed the world.” 
(Il Mondo della Musica, n. 135, marzo 1998)

I’ve run into Roberto Laneri many years ago, listening to ANADYOMENE, one of his most beautiful recorded works from the eighties, and above all I’ve been struck by his ability to express himself beyond any known model. However we have met only in January 1998, when I invited him to my radio program. On that occasion, I discovered and appreciated his rich artistic personality, both as a leading figure of overtone singing, and a bold sound-explorer, and, finally, as a refined jazz clarinet and saxophone player, whose simple and subtly ironic tones put him out of the current time-frames. This work marks Laneri’s re-entry in the world of jazz, an interesting journey to the wellsprings of afro-american music in their archaic and classical period, a homage to the jazz he loves most from a musician contemporary and yet ancient, capable of fusing extremely well echoes of Morton, Bechet and Armstrong together with original readings in a jazz key of classical 19th century compositions by Schubert and Schumann. The result is a perfectly successful project of contamination between jazz and classical music, fully enjoyable and most atypical in today’s Italian jazz panorama. 
(Roberto Franchina)

Reviews about LA VOCE DELL’ARCOBALENO

Roberto Laneri, a genius who all by himself roams Africa, the East and mitteleuropean thought, among Tibetan vocal overtones, conceptual electronic architectures, Pygmy and Bach cantatas. 
(Fare Musica, 08.07.86)

…Roberto Laneri’s performance, one of the Italian figures who have worked in the field of musical research with the most coherence and intelligence. 
(La Repubblica, 30.05.’86)

…among the festival’s most felicitous moments, Roberto Laneri’s solo-performance. Founder of the historical group PRIMA MATERIA and collaborator with the noted critic Joachim Ernst Berendt in the Nada Brahma permanent world-wide project, Laneri propounds a musical-cosmological idea which goes from Pythagoras to the 20th century historical avant-garde, touching on his way Bach, jazz and electronics. A versatile soprano-saxophonist (even with Charlie Mingus and Peter Gabriel), a specialist of the wind instruments of the world, a great manipulator of synthesizers and singer extraordinaire (both with tibetan overtone techniques and a peculiar falsetto), Laneri has offered, all by himself, a set consacrated to the most brilliant and all-encompassing eclecticism. He has produced vocal harmonics, a modulated high melodic whistle on a low pedal tone, on a tape with many voices (always his own) from his latest album “Two Views of the Amazon” by Wergo; he has played synths, programmed with phantom oscillating pitches on two of his own lyrical, twisted songs, “Black Lily” and “A Blossom”; he has performed his own classic “Memories of the Rain-Forest”, minimalistic, pentatonic, almost bluesy in a swirl of sequencers and live electronics; finally he has concluded by singing (in falsetto) an aria from the Bach Cantata n.33, using his synths as a “simulated baroque ensemble” a-la-Wendy Carlos. A tour of the world in an hour’s performance! 
(Tastiere, Sept. 86)

Reviews about MEMORIES OF THE RAIN-FOREST

“I don’t know what Africa is really saying to me, yet she speaks” This record is an event, for many reasons. It is the first CD by Roberto Laneri, an artist of the highest level who, for various reasons, has never had the fame he deserves. It is a record of avant-garde music, all Italian, which wins the match with most foreign works. It is a record conceived during a long time frame, deeply felt, sublimated, sprung from inner journeys. Often postponed during the year, it is now easily available. Jung’s statement which opens this review is taken from the CD’s liner notes and is thoroughly enlightening: in fact I can attest that the listening experience leads back to remote times and situations belonging to the history of humanity, to Africa, cradle of mankind and beginning of everything, still a source of sounds and colors which are extremely important for western man. Roberto Laneri’s Africa does not have geaographical connotations, it is more like an image, a point of departure, a starting point to transform the evolution of ethnic realities very far from one another into music. Art with a capital “A”, music of cosmic dimensions, in the sense that Roberto has succeeded in composing with the voices of the planet a work capable of expressing millennia of history and to reunite in an ideal sphere all the expressions of folk traditions. Voice, a didjeridoo, a few percussions, samples of primitive voices and ambiences, a sprinkling of electronics to organize and enrich the whole. Here we have a compositional structure, luckily without the aridity of Academia; love for improvisation as opposed to artistic inanity; absolute technical mastery as opposed to the amateurishness of today’s much music; an ethnic revival not dictated by fashion. Following Roberto we find Giuppi Paone, an unforgettable voice of immense potentials, and Daniele Patumi with his bass strings, old reliable friends, perfectly of one mind with their leader after years of shared adventures in the thousand meanders of artistic fusion. “Jung in Africa”, attributed to Peter Gabriel (but there is only a rhythm track donated to Laneri by the Englishman during the recording of “Gabriel IV”), “Hut Song”, “Mongombi II” and the title track are an immersion into the foliage of the equatorial forests and remain striking sonorous experiences: it is one thing to sing a few overtones, but composing using the voice and to reach such heights is something else. Finally, “Air” ventures to the most extreme boundaries, enetering avant-garde territories which should make many intellectual composers blush. How not to notice the enormous difference in quality compared to the other Overtone Singing gurus? I love naif painting, yet Kandinski is a different story! Today Hykes is a demi-god, Vetter saturates the record market, Bollmann and Goldman have a following; for years Laneri, a secretive and reserved charachter, has remained in the shade to compose and elaborate his music, waiting for the right occasion, distant from the spotlight and the noise: he was right, if today he illuminates our minds with this masterpiece. I cannot believe that in a sea of improvisers, snake-oil salesmen and peddlers of sounds, an artist like Roberto Laneri has much longer to wait. “Memories of the Rain-Forest” calls for the attention of the serious aficionado, and must put him in the forefront in the world of the avant-garde. 
(Gianluigi Gasparetti, Deep Listenings n.2, Winter 1995)

Reviews about INSIDE NOTES

…here the depths of singing and of harmonic sound speak, or rather are heard. To know how to capture the inner beauty embedded in the fundamentals is an experience perhaps uncommon, and yet universal. 
(Gino Dal Soler, World Music, n. 50,September 2001)

Reviews about SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

Old style sonorities from the forties (the artist’s memories and background) framing all the music which Laneri touched and studied and practiced during his musician’s life: this ambitious CD contains all the knowledge of this eclectic instrumentalist, who would seem to show us not so much the result of all these studies, but rather its parts before they are added together. And so, get ready for listening to “Sentimental Journey” sung by Giuppi Paone’s electronically manipulated saucy voice on a woodwind background (Laneri is a multi-instrumentalist). The effect is almost nightmarish, even though the harmony is thoroughly traditional, much like a soundtrack of a chilling thriller at moments, hypnotic in others. Laneri plays didjeridoo and didjeribone very well, emphasizing their compulsiveness with compelling riffs from electronic keyboards (Metamorphosis I). Or the bass clarinet’s refined sound on a not too reassuring melody of wind blowing (“Soul Massage”), subsequently changing into an almost “regular” polyphonic arrangement for winds (note the “almost”). The same goes also for the lighthearted rendition of “Bach Aria”, between jazz, Bach and Bobby McFerrin: “almost” Bach, almost jazz, almost musical fusion but not really, since everything is “almost novelty” deriving from the juxtaposition of diverse musical styles, rather than novelty deriving from their cultural assimilation. Romantic melodies (“Pienezza di luna”) with split-second delays which fools our hearing into an alarming doubling (a most attractive idea, one must say, exploited in “Polyphone” as well); overtone singing (of which Laneri is a scholar and practitioner) joined with the fascinating sound of the kontshovka flute into a sound search for ecstasy (“The Landing”); oniric or visionary post-LSD trips atmospheres (“Dream a Little Dream of me”) which we wouldn’t be surprised to listen to as a soundtrack from the “Saw” series. Summing up, a work which certainly stimulates curiosity and interest, but one which we cannot really make sense of the way sound research leads to, as if all this musical material were stacked together, waiting for being reworked into an up to date new material. A work in progress rather than a finished work: or perhaps a contemporary work for which we do not yet have parameters for interpretation, because too revolutionary? The ball is in the court of the listeners of this CD, surely interesting and “debatable” in the best sense of the term, meaning a welcome source of contrasting opinions. 
(Daniela Floris)

ALTERED STATES OF DREAMING-TRAVELING WITH LANERI
an itinerary of memories, loves and irrepressible technological fantasies in the sound laboratory of a visionary artist.

Records by Roberto Laneri do not appear too often, this secluded artist with an exquisite esoteric vocation, musician and researcher of ample breadth in the vast world of those musics and cultures which we are used to define as “other”, thus emphasizing a still lingering discrimination; worlds which we have met, chewed up and relegated in a corner, like exotic objects. The reprint of Sentimental Journey is the occasion to plunge again into the fantastic (oniric is too restrictive) world of a musician who has been practising the transcultural dimension of music for almost forty years, well before so-called world music. Laneri’s “sentimental journey” is an itinerary of memories, loves and irrepressible technological fantasies, mixed with a taste indulging in an altered, out of focus perception, between dreaming and sound-lab, starting from the memory of Sentimental Journey, the song made famous by Doris Day in the mid-forties and recreated by Giuppi Paone’s sympathetic vocal acrobatics. Articulated by the didjeridoo (Australian aboriginals’ ancestral tube, with its unique, throbbing sound) and its ideal partner, the zarb (the Persian drum with its deep dark pulse); then voices, the most diverse sound materials, clarinets and saxophones (of which Laneri is performer extraordinaire), flashes from Bach in the guise of joyful country garb, echoes from Ellington’s Mood Indigo, and, finally, a mischievous ars combinatoria, which puts everything together in an unpredictable kaleidoscopic collage. Laneri’s almost bulimic syncretism incorporates a life which has passed through the most diverse experiences and concrete musical practices, from didjeridoo to the overtone singing of central Asia. Neither experiment nor new age, rather a smiling, evocative and liberatory game. 
(Giordano Montecchi, L’Unità, 29.01.2011)

Your record is a great clever madness which succeeds in mixing the impossible: jazz, opera, world music, classical music, tribal music. Most important, your music is free in your heart. 
(Fran Muñoz Antón, programming director, CANAL 9 RADIO, LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA – ESPAÑA)

A didjeridoo is joined by a dreamy-and dreamt of-voice, and soon the mounting noise of the accompanying wind instruments becomes clearer, and leaving the didjeridoo, takes form in this suspended version of Sentimental Journey, the title piece of this CD. I was astounded by this arrangement which comes from nowhere, grows strong and energetic, then comes down in level again, finally swinging as if drunk with itself until it fades away. Intangible voices, didjeridoo, saxophone, clarinets, percussions and other distant sounds run one after another in Laneri’s latest work, but as one is trying to decode the unattainable, everything becomes more clear: the clarinet, saxophone or the didjeridoo take over and tell ancient soundtales. The author’s mastery, technique and experience allow him to intertwine the old and the new, noise and music, words and silences. A CD which may result dificult at a first listening, but if I may offer a suggestion try to listen to it a couple of times without paying attention, while you are engaged in other activities, then listen to it very attentively. You will hear different things according to your attitude: overtone singing, classical music, Pygmy singing, percussions like slowed-down tablas, strange voices, will transmit to everyone prrecise sound visions but different mental visions. 
(Ilario Vannucchi)

Love it! Great variety of stuff-and varied use of didj. This is all studio work? I’ve always liked electronic whisperings of well-known tunes-all that dreamlike stuff. Intimations from jazz and sentimentality for sure. I think my favourite was Mood Indigo. Strong didj with pitch shifts in the sound-goose bump stuff! 
(Ron Nagorcka, composer and didjeridoo player)

Contemporary music composer, connoisseur of extra-european musical traditions, multi-instrumentalist, habitué of the Italian jazz scene from the sixties and teacher at the Florence Conservatory, Roberto Laneri lists even Charles Mingus among his teachers, and today is an eclectic and original musician, just like this CD, Sentimental Journey. Easy and ifficult at the same time to talk about this work, since on one hand it has a coherent and distinctive structure, on the other hand it does not fit into any other possible “genre”. In effect we are dealing with a music which is above all oniric. It is so in its intention, since in the liner notes the title piece is linked to a childhood listening experience and its symbolic significance of opening up to a wonderful sound universe. It is so in concrete terms, since that wonderfully indefinite universe is recreated through the composition of diverse sonorities, both instrumental (reeds, didjeridoo, zarb, kontshovka, played and multitracked by Laneri), vocal (Laneri and Giuppi Paone) and percussive, often mixed with delays and bewildering effects. Finally, it is so in its structure, fusing into an organic and coherent whole classical (“BachAria”), jazz (“Mood Indigo”), rithmic (“Tough Tigers”), lyrical (“Pienezza di luna”), African (“Metamorphosis 1”) and oriental inspirations (“The Landing”). In the end, an intriguing CD, classifiable only as “contemporary”, meaning much or nothing, which has a lot of originality and begs for listening in order to understand. Not bad, in this “fast food era”. 
(rating: 3.5*, Neri Pollastri, All About Jazz)

Dreaming with sounds
A sense of anticipation, the heartbeat throbbing, a train rolling along, voices in the distance cut through the air, a breeze of a gentle persuasion caresses head, mind and soul. Melodies, memories, wanderings that melt all resistance away, encouraging the ride in the sounds, to allow one’s scattering (of the self) in the mosaic of sound forms, to get lost in the assembling and disassembling caleidoscope. The author tells us how, still a child, Doris Day’s voice in Sentimental Journey opened up to him, this imaginary sound-journey: a perfect voice, clean, ringing, tender and seductive. I have a similar memory myself, and was similarly affected. I must have heard it as a baby in Venezuela in the 50s, and since then that undulating, embracing melody has always triggered deep emotions, opening up for me great vistas of freedom. Traveling with no fear, and yet with the homesickness that goes together with new discoveries. A journey going forward as it comes back and coming back as it goes forward.
Can one really come home without getting lost before? And where and what is home?
Roberto Laneri goes in and out through the whole world of sounds and compositions, part of his quest. Obviously, his way is not Doris Day’s. It cannot be the same in a world so inesorably new, whose landscapes are in a state of perpetual fluctuation, under ever-changing skies, lights and shadows, a world in which all existing musics are meeting and impregnating one another whilst men make war. Music—such is its power—“makes peace”, can make distances grow near, can lovingly bring together all the sounds of the earth. Music can play with time as well, bringing together distant and near past. Laneri’s music can conjure up this magic: everything becomes present here and now, yet evoking the longest, even eternal journey. The individual soul succeeds in tuning up with the great collective, perennial unconscious. The enchantment may flash in each new piece, one step after another, although the journey might just as well begin with any piece, in a circular fashion.

Metamorphosis is pressing and urging. We cannot always stay the same, even though at times we may think of ourselves as immutable and eternal. The urge is to learn how discover the subtle mutations and discreet variations within a single note.
We can let the music massage our soul, then tone it up with a Bach Aria, then again languidly relax in the yearning luminous spell of a full moon. If only we could stay on this moon a little longer…
Poliphone sucks us in again, like a sudden small vortex in a lazy river. Nothing dangerous, only a spritz of refreshing bubbles, a voluptuous shower of sounds. Multitracking multiplies Giuppi Paone’s voice, bringing us into the thousand refractions of sound-mirrors: again, the chase of difference and sameness, landing for a moment (The Landing) on root tones and their overtones. Another shower, a massage perhaps, but no, nothing of the sort. This time it is the deepest within, a feeling in the chest waking up and lying contained, centered, still, powerful: energy slowly opening up with no dispersion. Grounded, for sure, firmly poised yet weightless. Ready to meet Soft Tigers and Tough Tigers—all tigers ask for caution, above all those which could tear the soul apart.
Soft Tigers materialize on an exotic, hypnotic carpet, woven with all the clays, colors and percussive sounds of far away lands. In reality, the didjeridoo leads the pack, since the sax by itself would never make it. Tough Tigers, the more dangerous and disturbing ones, need the overtones of human and non-human voices to be kept at bay.
A sudden veering off course takes us back to a western time-zone—Mood Indigo’s jazz revisited—zooming up again on Pangea, the echoes of conventional instruments left behind by an overbearing didjeridoo. How elementary our musical instruments, although refined and detailed in their construction, compared to the didjeridoo, truly elemental yet able to evoke such complex and manifold listening experiences!
Is it because we are so used to our instruments, whereas aboriginal and exotic instruments zero into new areas of sensory and psychic consciousness? One more reason then to be grateful for Laneri’s music, whose listening opens wide up visual and synaesthetic horizons of all kinds. It really feels like being there, in all those places, with all the colors, the smells, the faces and the bodies of other men and women both like and unlike us, and also being in the no-place of our inner world, each of us with one’s personal representation.

Drum Talk puts together more definitely the perfect blending between synthetic sounds, produced with the aid of our advanced technology, and the sounds ostensibly coming from the acoustic instruments of poor, indigenous people, as well as human untreated voices. And yet the true origin of each sound is hard to trace, as it gets lost in the harmonious ensemble. In the end we can listen to the dreaming just because the CD is here to stay with its digital technology, affecting not only the composition of music but its reproduction and public exposure.

On several occasions I have had the chance to listen to Roberto Laneri’s live performances, a different, perhaps more total experience for sure, as it happens, I believe, in the case of much music. Actually, private and repeated CD-quality listening of the individual pieces helps to discover not only new elements of the compositions, but above all new personal reactions to the myriad of creative facets Laneri includes in his artistic work. Habit never really sets in, in fact one could say of him he is not only a “composer”, but a truly original, perhaps unique, “de-composer.”

Not by chance, this sound-dreaming ends with another classic, mirroring and echoing the CD title: from Sentimental Journey to Dream a Little Dream of Me. After this journey around the world, the traveller goes back to the intimacy of the night, of a small, personal dream—“dream of me, a little dream is enough”. Perhaps this is the meaning of a home to come back to, of this “sentimental journey home”. A home within the heart, a feeling, a thought, a dream in which all things can abide peace-fully, in the fullness of peace. If only for a while. Thank you, Roberto.

(Elena Liotta, Jungian Psychoanalist)

Reviews about ESCHER

The blues marks the start and end of this CD, which is certainly innovative in its structure and concept, and yet plays with the listener, leaving him room to breathe suggestions which are familiar and not twisted as in Laneri’s other work reviewed in this same newsletter. A sort of journey in the world of sound, according to the two artists, which explores sound in all its possible facets: the clarinet and saxophone’s melodic mellowness, seconded by the piano’s harmonic richness and the percussion’s laziness (“Imaginary Crossroads”); or, almost in form of nostalgia and reminiscence, the most archaic blues, with the piano sketching the most typical ostinato of traditional blues, evolving into a short destructured, almost atonal episode as in European contemporary music, coming back to that blues in the beginning, however distorted into creative digressions, even in the form of “noise”; or the almost onirical dimension of only two alternating swinging chords of oriental flavor securing the atmosphere, both with this harmonic alternance and the instruments’ stretched intervals, the piano’s swinging, never repetitious improvisation; or the goading–neither melodic nor rhythmic- “cybernetic” atmosfphere of “Wind & Water Dance”, which, even when it opens up to long-winded phrasings and chords does not give up the mischievous prickly sounds in the background; or the continuos sonorous thickness of “Circular Crossroads”, in which the bass clarinet paints a dark background for the higher winds to embroider improvised, almost precious melodic digressions, occasionally bringing to mind golden scribbles on a heavy important black cloth, fading into the fascinating sound of the solo. This work (except the two blues in the beginning and in the end, recorded live) is entirely built by multitracking, with much attention to details, very interesting, to be enjoyed in total silence, without clinging to any visual or hearing surrounding space or time, for the hour of its duration. New, aesthetically very pleasing, relaxing, interesting. 
(Daniela Floris)

Albums and projects bring up again the creative and unorthodox figure of Laneri (composer, multi-instrumentalist, overtone singing specialist, conservatory teacher). Trained mostly in the U.S.A., collaborator of Charles Mingus and Peter Gabriel, the clarinetist and soprano sax player proposes a circular journey which takes the blues as its point of departure (the first one Monk and Lacy-like, the last one with imaginary echoes of Johnny Dodds) touching a series of stop-over pieces charachterized by a strong sense of space-time: from Colorado to ancient Egypt, from the “South” as a mental category to California. His associate is pianist Fabio Sartori, and he uses multi-track recording and electronic elaborations. Roberto Laneri’s music is never merely descriptive, rather evocative and visual-visionary, essential, profound. 
(Luigi Onori, ALIAS, Il Manifesto, 1.10.2011)

Reviews about DREAMTIME PROJECT

Eyes wide open and alert senses for a show (at Rome’s Teatro Vascello) which deals with magic, Because all human experience, coming down to it, is magic, as the aboriginals are very well aware of. Ilaria Drago, Roberto Laneri and Alberto Tessore, who built this hour-long project, not to mention the time to settle down once it is over, are well aware of this too. (…) Poetry becomes an alluring flow, broken by the sounds of a man on the ground who blows his own spirit’s origin in the archetype of a vital breath in the didjeridoo’s long chamber and spreads the now into his soprano sax, resetting any distance between what was and what is. 
(Avanti, 20.10.2005)

Reviews about BREATH

The breath of music.
The multi-instrumentalist’s journey between sounds and cultures.
Roberto Laneri’s new double CD, BREATH-MUSICA IN FORMA DI CRISTALLI, is a witness to the boundless musical culture of this intriguing character who inhabits today’s music planet. Clarinet and saxophone player, didjeridoo virtuoso, Australian aboriginals’ wind and lip instrument, Laneri is also a practitioner of overtone singing, the technique which emphasizes the overtones of the human voice, allowing the vocalist to produce two or more sounds at the same time.
It would be misleading tough to talk about fusion or multiethnic culture, because Laneri shows deep respect for different cultures, which are never, so to speak, re-hashed in discographic sauce, but rather studied and used to widen a very personal expressive palette. The CD includes wo separate projects, but which mirror each other even in the number of the pieces, 7 each. In both cases the center piece, fourth upon seven, corresponds to two different readings of John Coltrane’s Spiritual, which goes to prove that number symbology has its weight. In this piece John Coltrane opens up his language to Indian scales, initiating the progress of gradual loosening of the rules which in effect is part of the jazz tradition: an urge toward freedom of expression which obviously Laneri endorses. The first CD, Breath, is a solo performance by Laneri, supported by multitracking and samples. After what has just been said, one would not expect the performance to start and end with two dances, an Allemande and a Bourrée, taken from the Partita Bwv 1013 by Johann Sebastian Bach,amply reinterpreted by Laneri on soprano sax from a perspective of improvisation. In fact, Bach’s pieces are the gates of entrance and exit for a kind of musical introspection in which different musical parameters such as sound, harmony, rhythm, are interweaved in a liquid dimension. The link between Laneri and a character like Giacinto Scelsi must have originated from their common interest for introspection: some excerpts from the second part of Il sogno 101, Scelsi’s autobiography provide a text for Musica in forma di cristalli, featuring Ilaria Drago as narrating voice, and IN FORMA DI CRISTALLI, the overtone singing ensemble founded and directed by Laneri himself. Compositional virtuosity shows itself in this suite, wittyly reinterpreting Guillaume de Machaut’s famous Complainte from Le reméde de fortune, followed by music from the Notre Dame school (which marks the beginning pf polyphony in the West), Pygmy chanting, already mentioned Coltrane and even Irish echoes. 
(Luca del Fra-L’Unità, venerdì 29 marzo 2013)

Reviews about LA VOCE DELL’ARCOBALENO (book)

A new release of La voce dell’arcobaleno (288 pages, €14, Edizioni Il Punto d’Incontro), a “handbook” on overtone singing as well as a wonderful essay on life as vibration, written by Italy’s leading authority Roberto Laneri. Laneri is well-known, other than as a composer, arranger, clarinet teacher, player of a vast number of instruments (alto and soprano sax, clarinet, bass clarinet. didjeridoo), for his in depth work on overtone singing, both as a scholar and interpreter, which has been going on for decades.
In simple terms harmonics, or overtones, are the sounds which constitute a sound (they are responsible for the shaping a sound as well as for each instrument’s unique timbre), and their sequence is arranged according to a precise, mathematical order. The relationships among the frequencies in the harmonic series reproduces the same ratios found by Pythagoras in his experiments with the monochord, which he defined as archetypes of form, examples of the harmony and equilibrium which can be seen at work everywhere. In the philosopher’s opinion, music and life coincide. In this, Pythagoras is certainly not isolated: in the ancient shamanistic traditions of Mongolia, Africa, Arabia and Mexico, in the judeo-christian cabalistic traditions and the sacred spiritual traditions of Tibet, vocal sounds and overtones have been used to heal and transform, to communicate with the divine and to balance the body energy centers.
In La Voce dell’arcobaleno, Laneri takes the reader step by step into the nature of the overtones, the history of music and humanity’s spiritual search, finally touching upon the teaching of the vocal techniques which make overtone singing possible. 
(Valeria Trigo, L’Unità, 3 aprile 2012)

Reviews about NEL CIELO DI INDRA

The discovery that white is not devoid of colors, but contains them all, opens new fascinating spaces in the mind. It triggers a little “hunt” toward that which exists beyond what the eyes see, and that may trickle off as a river in the desert, or bring fruit and expand into the “feeling” of life.
The experience of “awakening” has a different ring for different people. For musician Roberto Laneri it was the discovery of what was inside the voice: “In the summer of 1972 I had a spontaneous experience of overtone singing… I had no way of knowing then that that experience would later prove the most efficient and disrupting single factor of transformation in my life, which would bring me to a total change of attitude regarding music, and not only music.”
Forty years after that ring of metamorphosis, Laneri has a second book on overtone singing, published by Terre Sommerse, whose title, Nel cielo di Indra, is already a vision in itself. “In the Heaven of Indra-says the buddhist sutra- there is said to be a network of pearls so arranged that if you look ot one you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in fact is every other object.”
Voilà, for Laneri overtone singing actually is the Heaven of Indra. “it is something real–composer and multiinstrumentalist who taught at the Florence conservatory until 2011 explains in an interview to Adnkronos–since each sound contains in itself many more sounds, viz. the overtone series as a gossamer net, for those who are able to distinguish it.” As the astral body, which exists side by side with the physical body even though not everyone is capable of seeing it, so does each sound have harmonics within itself. It is as if, taking a book in our hands, we could see all its subatomic interrelationships. “For this reason–he remarks-to practise overtone singing means developing these possibilities of interrelating, both with himself and the others. The way I see it-says overtone singer Laneri-music is not a superstructure, but the Universe’s real structure, its energy structure. Therefore,developing awareness of this energy net can change one’s life.”.
Nel cielo di Indra is a true how to do book for overtone singing, comes with a CD, and “has been written-Laneri the didjeridoo player informs-to answer what appears to be the no. 1 problem of those who have received an introduction to overtone singing techniques and yet cannot find opportunities for practice and evolution, both technical and spiritual”.
“In general the first impact of a workshop or other situations conducive to the harmonic experience-adds the musician, who has recorded for the most important radio stations and lists several records to his credit-is in any case very strong, to the point that for many people (certainly for myself) the first overtone singing experience may be akin to a true initiation, a quantum jump in aural perception. The result-he hemphasizes-is a stepping up of the individual’s energy level, which nonetheless bears the risk to dissipate if it is not supported not by a casual experience, but by a daily practice”.
For Laneri “a factor which favors this integration is the very structure of overtone singing, inescapably modeled on the harmonic series which, as any other geometric-mathematical progression, is in itself devoid of personal contents, which may be implemented by everyone according to infinitely different modalities. Usually I am not very fond of prophesizing, and yet-dares the musician, in 2002 elected creative member of the Budapest Club, founded by Edwin Laszlo fo further planetary consciuosness- I like to imagine a universe (including our own) in which, after the first experience, every practitioner manages to incorporate its procedures, techniques and modalities in his own work and life, so that the aural perceptual leap forward favors something which may be defined as ‘harmonic thinking’ or ‘harmonic consciousness’. Only then the original experience attains creative and transforming possibilities.” 
(Veronica Marino, Roma, August 18, 2014, Adnkronos)