“Look and learn a bit how to look at yourself / time goes by without stopping / and you are forward enough already” writes Ciuma in “No Comment” - a song from the latest Bevano Est album, “Ramingo”.

Folk music as a solid base upon which to build a future is a well-ascertained fact; many words have been spent on the meaning and usefulness of tradition. But to be faced with the works of Bevano Est one immediately senses, especially those who have tasted in their time “Gradisca” or “Fuoco Centrale”, an actual aroma of other times, which with the distance of years, astonishes as when meeting an old school friend whose face you find authoritatively marked by time.

The Romagnolo quintet, who years ago chose such a non-place par excellence as a highway cafe for its name, plays to delocalize folk's centre of gravity: the accordion, guitar, clarinet, violin and percussion photograph a landscape scrolling through the window of a moving car, a kind of simple and narrow highway between the hills of Romagna.

The group's strength lies in their being visual with the sound and orchestration: the musics of the past, that of the waltz and the fears carried in its arms upon the platforms of earth and wine; but also that of the tango or klezmer lent by like-minded populations in the urgency of dance, all live by sincere images in their works.

Not surprisingly therefore are they equally at ease with soundtracks; the score for “Il dolce rumore della vita” by Giuseppe Bertolucci is splendid. This is what makes us listen to Bevano Est with an open and participating spirit which brings us closer to folk music, even in the original compositions signed Delvecchio or Bendi, despite their accessible “draw-sound”, seem closer to compositions made by composers and orchestrators rather than performers or spokesmen.

It is surely not folk revival, it is a revisitation of tradition through the filter of human consciousness more than technique. It is difficult, at least for me, to calibrate clutch and accelerator on the balancing point between analysis and compliment, because their ability to communicate the large and rich themes of humanity is really something foreign to time: the heart that rides life without going soft, the dream that preserves a material, essential, honest form. Human. Bevano Est have many qualities, and also the defects which humanity - intended as kind, not genus - brings with it.

Sorry, today I focused only on the merits; as for collecting the defects, there is always time.