Fabio & Diego Resta: Balkan and Ottoman Music at Tapadum

We opened 2020 the way we ended 2019 — with music that travels. On January 18, the Resta brothers came to Tapadum for one of our home concerts: an evening of Balkan and Ottoman repertoire performed on instruments that most audiences in Faenza had never seen up close.

Eleven people came. Eighty-six more had been thinking about it.

Fabio & Diego Resta: Field Research as Performance

The Resta brothers are multi-instrumentalists who have spent years researching and performing repertoires from the Mediterranean, with particular focus on Turkey and Macedonia. What distinguishes their work is not academic distance but direct engagement — they learned on the ground, in the field, from the musicians and communities where these traditions live.

Their instrument list speaks for itself:

• Fabio — ney, gajda, kaval, bagpipes
• Diego — tanbur, oud, Macedonian tambura, guitar

Fabio moves between wind instruments from different ends of the Mediterranean — the Ottoman ney, the Bulgarian gajda, the Balkan kaval, and various forms of bagpipe. Diego covers the plucked string traditions: the long-necked Ottoman tanbur, the Arab-Turkish oud, the Macedonian tambura, and guitar as a bridge between worlds.

A Round Trip Through Oral Tradition

The evening’s program was a curious round trip through the modal musical traditions of oral culture scattered between Italy, Turkey, and Macedonia.

The gajda, a Balkan bagpipe with a sound that can fill a hillside, is not an obvious companion to the ney, the slender end-blown flute of Ottoman classical music. But placed in the same room, played by brothers who know both intimately, they reveal how much the two traditions share beneath the surface differences.

See Them in Action

Before the concert, we already knew their work from these recordings — a good sense of the instrumental range and tonal depth they bring to a room.

After the Concert: Jam Session

As always at Tapadum, the concert was followed by an open jam session. Local musicians were invited to bring their instruments and join in. The Resta brothers are exactly the kind of musicians who thrive in that format — able to move between Turkish makam, Macedonian rhythm, and whatever someone else brought to the table.

Tapadum hosts concerts from across the Mediterranean and beyond. Explore our handcrafted instrument collection or follow our upcoming events.

Özgür Yalçın is the founder of Tapadum and the founding member of Karagüneş. He has performed ethnic and world music across Europe for over twenty-five years and builds custom instruments from Tapadum’s workshop in Brisighella, Italy.