Kavisha Mazzella - Official website

How do you think all this impacted on your music?

KM: “When I first started exploring Italian folk music, I felt to a certain level that a part of me came home.  And this was Neapolitan street music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which is just fantastic music.  When I was at art school I had a party in my last year, and this Sicilian guy came to the party, ‘Sanjiva’, and he had brought all these tapes of Sicilian and Neapolitan music with him.  And they were bands that were contemporary in Italy in the late seventies.  They were having their own folk revival there, while the English and Irish folk revival was happening.  And they were just fantastic, and it was really exciting because it was something Italian that was exciting to me.  You know, it didn’t sound like the trashy pop stuff that I associate Italian music with (laughs).”

And how did you come to that conclusion?

KM: “(Laughs) You know, Italian music to me had been really embarrassing up until this point, and here I had found something that was really exciting, and something that I would be wanting to explore further.  That led me later on to start the Italian Women’s Club, when I was just playing that music to a group to Italian women, and from that whole experience, and that enthusiasm for traditional stuff, but done in a really gutsy sort of way.  Neapolitan music is very feisty and fiery, and it’s very exciting.  And from that project I started writing songs about the experiences of immigrants in this country… actually hang on a second…”

(All of a sudden a Schoenbergian piano concerto begins to thunder in the background of this phone conversation, and Kavisha tells a playful child that there is an actual interview in progress.)

“… So you know, I guess in a way from exploring my heritage, I found that the natural progression was to write songs about what happens when you come to this country.  Although when I immigrated here I was three years old, and I was too young to remember, the whole thing of leaving England, where I was born, and coming here, I’d been made so aware of that all my life, just in references.  But that whole feeling of coming to this country, and what that means, and feeling that you never quite belong here, and trying to find ways that you can belong to this country, I think the way is to acknowledge that you’re an immigrant actually, ironically.  Once you embrace the fact that you have come from somewhere else, well then you’ve got somewhere to start with, and you’re not totally lost in a limbo.  So acknowledging that music through the traditional forms led me on to being able to write about it, and write about the experience in the way that being an immigrant is also its own unique experience, because when you come to this country you change the country, and you are changed by the country.  And in a way if you go back to the country of origin, you’re never the same anyway.  You know, you can’t ever belong to where you once left, so in a way that makes you very Australian.  Because all of us are mostly indigenous people, we’ve come from somewhere, and in fact the experience of being an immigrant is truly an Australian experience.”