interview with The Django's -street music-
Have any of you played in other bands? Johan: I played in a band when I was younger and I played in a duo later with my ex girlfriend, Chiara: I always played solo except for some very short term impro bands from meetings in the street.
How is it that you started playing music? Johan: I just felt connection with music. Chiara: I was taking piano lessons as a child in a music school.
What are your names?/Who plays what?/ How old are you? J: My name is Johan Hagström, I play guitar and I´m 50 years young. C: My name is Chiara Bolignari, I play piano accordion, piano and transverse flute, and I´m 30 years young.
Have you had other previous members? Yes we had, 3 years ago we was living in Malaga and we used to play with a Violin player and a "Cajon" player. We also played live for some aerial acrobatic performance with the amazing duo "Air Pandora" always in Malaga.
Did you make music even when you were young? What do you mean, man, we are still young!! By the way yes Johan did, Chiara played piano as a child but then left music ´till she was more or less 20 years young and felt a strong calling for playing again.
Where are you from? Johan was born in Uppsala, Sweden and Chiara in Florence, Italy.
What year did the band form? We met each other in 2013 and we started to play music together and that´s when our musical process started to take shape.
What´s your style of genre? That´s a question many people ask us when they hear us, and we always try to explain that it is a fusion between our personal styles and feelings...we found out that the best way of defining it is to call it "Just Music".
What inspires you? Absolutely everything we live, our travels, busking, nature, our garden, our dog Django (that we met in Tenerife and never leaves our side).
Do you have other interests of work outside the band? We are open for new connections but what we would really like is to play again for some circus or dance live performance.
Are you looking for a booking agency, and what are your thoughts around that? We honestly have no experience with that at all...
Are you looking for a label, and what are your thoughts around that? We have no experience with that either so we can´t really say…
What made you decide to make this music? It really happened by itself, we had some songs, we started to play them together and everything got influenced from each other´s style and way of playing, there is a lot of improvisation in what we do.
What are your songs about? About the flow of life with it´s freedom and it´s demons.
Who does the composing and writes the lyrics? We both do all.
Do you start with the music or the lyrics? We usually start with the music.
Do you compose in a certain environment? We have been creating music while hitchhiking, after busking, sometimes songs (or a beginning of them) just popped up even while busking.
Have you done any covers live? We like to play our music, but there are some covers we always like to play,like for exempel "Libertango" from Astor Piazzolla.
What language do you sing in? We sing in English, we just have some lines in Spanish in a song, but who knows maybe in the future we will sing in our mother languages too..
What are the least and the most of your concerts attendants? The least it´s 15 people and the most was around 150 people.
What ages are the most of your concert attendants? Between 25 and 50.
Do you always play the same songs live, or do you vary? We have some songs that we always play, then we have some old ones that we stopped playing and some new ones that we add to our live repertoire.
Do you have a regular place you play live often? Now that we are staying in Porto we have a couple of cultural associations to play at, one is "Casa da Horta" another is "Macareu", here there are a lot of nice cultural associations where people go to eat nice food and listen to live music.
What was you latest gig? It was 2 nights ago in one of these associations here in Porto, there was around 20 people and it was very cosy.
Have you had to cancel a gig? No, never.
Where have you played live this year? In Portugal.
Where do you plan to gig the coming year? No plans, for the moment we are here..
When did you start to sell merchandise, and what do you have for sale? We had Cds but people are not really into it anymore..so we will soon have our music digitally distributed and on music platforms.
What do you think about people downloading music instead of buying records now a days? It has some good points and some bad points like everything, it makes it accessible to be an independent artist but it killed the sales of physical Cds.
What do you think of my work? We think you make a grate work giving voice to musicians.
How do you think and know that this interview will help you in the music business? We think it will help us to be known by more people.
Do you have any role models or idols? Oh yes we do, we love Jethro Tull, Metallica, Paco de Lucia, Ludovico Einaudi, 2Cellos, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Le Cardamomo.
Why do you think that they exist? ´Couse fortunately this world is full of art and these people was brave enough to keep doing what they are good at.
Is it easier to find inspiration from older bands, or bands that are more active today? Both, inspiration is all around.
What have been your biggest obstacles? Obstacles are just the other face of opportunities, but our biggest difficulty has for sure been restrictive busking laws in many places in Europe in the last years.
What advice would you give other bands or artists? Keep doing what you do with passion and love.
How do you get psyched for a gig? At the moment we live in a beautiful place in the nature so we just go by the river some hours before our gigs in town, if we are far from home we just breath and focus on the love and passion we want to give to people through our music.
What are your web sites? Our page on Facebook called "The Django´s -street music-" ( here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/Djangostreetmusic/
How can people reach? Writing a message directly on our page.
What are your plans for the future? We plan to release our full album in the digital world, keep playing music and we hope to find other artists to make nice collaborations with.
Do you have something to add? We want to thank all the people that liked our music, all the people that listened to our music in the street and came and hug us with tears in their eyes after a performance or just smiled, clapped their hands or in any way appreciated it. We want to thank all the children or adults with Down Sindrome, Autism or any other kind of speciality in their being, for dancing, feeling alive or touching our instruments during our street performances. We also want to thank all the police officers that appreciated our performances even if busking was illegal, and all of the police officers that has been unnecessarily unpolite to us. We thank all these people ´couse each one of them, and each one of them in their own personal way, remembered us that we was born with the purpose of sharing music from our souls. We thank you Robex Lundgren, for giving us the opportunity of this interview and we thank you that are reading it in this moment.
