Taken from his forthcoming new album Blessed Sadness, watch the latest video from composer and performer Antoni O’Breskey for “Eighteen Years Old”, which also features the vocals of his daughter Consuelo Nerea Breschi of Varo. They are also joined by Davide Viterbo (fiddle), Aongus Mac Amlaigh (cello), Paddy Cummins (mandolin), and Giorgio Vendola (double bass).
While a combination of influences presents a unique and considered sound, O’Breskey’s piano interplay is quite breathtaking, drawing as much from jazz as he does Irish traditional music his musical approach is quite mesmerising. It’s as if we’re seeing the transformative memory from his 40th birthday, which he describes below, through the mists of time. As before, his daughter’s enchanting vocals complete the circle.
Antonio says, “Back in the beginning of the 90’s I was touring with Dolores Keane, John Faulkner and Mairtin O’Connor around Tuscany, and between one gig and another, we would end up having late nights playing and singing by the fireplace at my place in S.Quirico in Collina. Once, on my 40th birthday, Dolores sang ‘Eighteen years old’ while Tomas de los Reyes, a flamenco gypsy guitarist touring with us at the time and who was accompanying her, began to transform the song into a ‘cante jondo’.
“My daughter Consuelo must have been around four, and I remember her face being enthralled by Dolores’ singing! Thirty years later, I heard her singing this song in the kitchen, and it immediately came to my mind that it ought to be part of the album.
“This song is about an impatient eighteen-year-old girl (in other variants of this song, the girl appears to be sixteen), her dreams to hold a man in her arms, her determination to leave a hard and cruel life of daily toil and her openly confronting of a harsh mother…
“That may be the way with you mama, but it isn’t the way with me, for I’m young and airy, light and crazy, and married I long to be…”
Watch the accompanying video by Olga Kuzmenko below, a visual and artful delight that compliments the song perfectly. Eighteen Years Old is also our Song of the Day.
Conceived at the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020, Antonio’s new album ‘Blessed Sadness’ was recorded between Italy and Ireland, in collaboration with an extensive ensemble of musicians, including Ultan O’Brien (Slow Moving Clouds), Davide Viterbo (Distant City), Consuelo Nerea Breschi (Varo), Paddy Cummins (Skipper’s Alley), Leonora Lyne and many more.
‘Eighteen Years Old’ by Antoni O’Breskey and Consuelo Nerea Breschi is out now.
‘Blessed Sadness’, the new album by Antonio O’Breskey, will be out Wednesday 14th July 2021. Pre-order on Bandcamp https://nomadicpiano.bandcamp.com/album/blessed-sadness
Photo Credit: Milena Giacomazzi