PAOLO ANGELI with TBD special guest

The Cedar Presents

PAOLO ANGELI with TBD special guest

Friday March 21, 2025/ Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 8:00 PM

All Ages

Seated

$25 Advance, $30 Day of Show

This is a seated show with general admission, first-come-first-served seating. The Cedar is happy to reserve seats for patrons who require special seating accommodations. To request access accommodations, please go to our

For Cedar presented shows, online ticket sales typically end one hour before the door time, and then, based on availability, tickets will be available at the door.

Paolo Angeli is an artist whose imaginative leaps defy gravity. Drawing on his deep knowledge of traditional Sardinian music, he inhabits a timeless zone as a soil-rooted master and brash experimentalist. While suffused with Mediterranean cadences, Angeli’s original pieces encompass flamenco, jazz, Baroque, post-rock and new music. He plays a guitar of his own invention, a fantastical 18-string hybrid combining elements of guitar, cello and drums.

A feast for the eyes as well as the ears, Angeli in full flight is an astounding sight, as he bows, strikes, hammers, plucks and strums an instrument with strings going in all directions and foot-pedal-controlled motorized propellers.

It’s not surprising that this singular musician has improvised and collaborated with masters such as Pat Metheny, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, Zeena Parkins, and Phillip Greenlief. Angeli’s music may be unclassifiable, but it takes no expertise to recognize its strange and extravagant beauty.

Paolo Angeli, the Sardinian sorcerer, manually magics beautiful, multi-layered music from his unique prepared guitar: a hybrid orchestra of an instrument with strings going in all directions, foot-pedal-controlled motorized propellers and hammers to create shimmering drones and bass-lines as he bows, strikes, plucks and strums while producing rhythmic atmospherics by treading on a plastic bag and adjusting tunings on the fly. Electronic effects are utilized but no loops. With this singular instrument he improvises and composes unclassifiable music, suspended between traditional music of Sardinia, free jazz, flamenco, Arabic suggestions, post-folk and pre-everything else.
Born in 1970 in an extremely stimulating musical environment, Paolo Angeli grew up in Palau, a small port in northern Sardinia that looks out on the 12 islands of the Maddalena archipelago, a rugged scenic area of turquoise lagoons, national parks, and pristine beaches. He started to play guitar when he was nine. The guitar and the voice of his father (his first mentor), the rock bands of the village, his experience at concerts in village squares, and carnival evenings all pointed him in a direction that eschewed stylistic barriers in music. In 1989, he moved to Bologna and started to play with various contemporary music ensembles, practicing collective composition and improvisation, breaking down the borders between musical genres, and playing in the main European festivals of innovative music. In 1993, he met Giovanni Scanu, a legendary Sardinian guitar player who died at the age of 95. Scanu taught him the forms and the components of the canto a chitarra gallurese e logudorese, old songs in the Sardinian dialects of Gallurese and Logudorese, traditionally accompanied by guitar. From this clash between avant-garde and popular tradition came Angeli’s Sardinian prepared-guitar: an instrument with 18 strings—a hybrid between baritone guitar, cello, and drums, replete with hammers, pedals, and variable pitch propellers. Since 1997, he has played concerts with his modified guitar all over the world at some of the most important festivals and theaters of Europe, Japan, Australia, North and South America, Russia, and Africa.
Paolo has collaborated with Pat Metheny (who uses Angeli’s guitar in Orchestrion), Fred Frith, Hamid Drake, Iva Bittová, Butch Morris, Ned Rothenberg, Jon Rose, Derek Gripper, Antonello Salis, Evan Parker, Takumi Fukushima, Louis Sclavis, and Paolo Fresu, among others. He has also recorded more than 50 CDs. Angeli has a degree in ethnomusicology and has digitized the Archivio Mario Cervo, the most important collection of Sardinian records and traditional music. As a researcher, he has published Canto in Re, a volume of historical analysis of the cantu a chittera. With Nanni Angeli, he is the artistic director of Isole che parlano, an international arts festival suspended between innovation and tradition that has taken place in Palau since 1996. Angeli currently lives between Sardinia and Barcelona, always facing the sea. His 2018–2019 world tour started with an astonishing Carnegie Hall performance.

"...Plenty of critics have suggested that the age of guitar music is over, but they must be thinking of somebody besides Paolo Angeli. The Sardinian musician, vocalist, and ethnomusicologist might be one of the world’s most innovative guitarists, judging not just by his experimental compositions but also by the instrument he’s created to play them: a prepared chiterra sarda (“Sardinian guitar,” a large-bodied baritone)... " - Jamie Ludwig - Chicago Reader.

To learn more about Paolo Angeli:

• Visit his website here

This show is sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago

Host or Publisher The Cedar Cultural Center