Gavardi-Socal Balkan Duo at Tapadum: Saxophone, Fretless Guitar, and Turkish Saz

November 26 closed our 2022 autumn season with a duo rooted in the Balkan peninsula — a part of the world whose musical traditions have been crossing, colliding, and fusing for centuries, and whose sound still carries that history in every phrase.

Nine people came. Thirty-seven more had been thinking about it.

The Duo

• Francesco Socal — saxophone, clarinets
• Giulio Gavardi — guitar, fretless guitar, Turkish saz

The wind instruments of Francesco Socal meet the strings of Giulio Gavardi to explore the traditional melodies of the Balkan Peninsula. Between tradition and improvisation, between moments of quiet persuasion and bursts of energy, the varied repertoire of those lands bears witness to a turbulent history of cultural crossings and intersections — sounding to the Western ear mysterious and deeply compelling.

The Instrument that Changes Everything

The fretless guitar deserves particular attention. A standard guitar has frets — the metal strips across the neck that divide the scale into fixed semitones. Remove them, and the player gains access to the microtonal inflections that define Balkan, Turkish, and Middle Eastern music: the quarter tones, the slides between pitches, the subtle sharpening and flattening of specific notes within a modal framework that give this music its characteristic emotional colour.

In conventional Western music, those inflections are either absent or treated as expressive ornaments. In Balkan and Turkish music, they are structural. The fretless guitar gives Giulio Gavardi access to that structure in a way that a standard guitar cannot — allowing him to play inside the modal language rather than approximating it from the outside.

The Turkish saz — the long-necked lute central to Anatolian folk and Alevi music — extends that reach further, bringing a timbre and a repertoire that the guitar, fretless or otherwise, cannot fully replicate.

Francesco Socal’s saxophone and clarinets move through the same modal territory from the wind side. The clarinet has deep roots in Balkan music — it is the lead instrument of the Romani brass band tradition — and in Francesco’s hands it carries that weight without abandoning its own qualities.

The Balkan Repertoire

The Balkan Peninsula is not a single musical culture but a layered archive of Greek, Ottoman, Romani, Slavic, Albanian, and Jewish musical traditions, accumulated and mixed over centuries of shared and contested geography. The melodies that emerge from that mixture sound unlike anything from a single tradition, because they are not from a single tradition. They carry traces of everything that passed through.

That is what makes Balkan music sound, as Gavardi and Socal put it, mysterious and fascinating to the Western ear — not because it is exotic, but because it is genuinely multiple. It contains more than one history at once.

Hear the Duo

A live recording that gives a sense of the duo’s sound:

After the Concert: Jam Session

The evening closed with an open jam session — the final one of the 2022 season at Tapadum. A good way to end the year: doors open, instruments welcome, the music continuing past the last scheduled note.

Tapadum hosts concerts and workshops throughout the year. 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.