BO.Dà: The criteria is based on the songs that could be better adapted to jazz and bossa arrangements, the style we wanted to give the record. We gave La Isla Bonita a bossa treatment and Holiday became a swing track, having in mind a Madonna from the '30s: it wasn't hard to do as she's quite chameleontic and picturing her in various ages and different settings comes quite natural.

MT: Ok, so you completely re-elaborated and re-arranged the songs you chose. How did you get into the process and was there a song that was particurarly difficult to work with?

BO.Dà: If you listen carefully, the original songs already give you an input, they almost have a coded message between the lines.
You should know how to listen and be inspired according to your own sensibility. Bo.Dà, didn't come up with anything new. Jazzmen before us used to take bits and pieces of operatic works or hits of their times and turned them into blues: the Sidney Bechet solo on Summertime is a great example of this, it's a pure rip off of the "aria di Eleonora" from Verdi's Trovatore.

MT: Are there any tracks you worked on and that didn't end up on the final album for some reason?

BO.Dà: There's a cover of "Sorry" that didn't make the album because it was born during a live show after the record was already completed.
We changed the song from dance to swing!

MT: Do you consider yourselves Madonna fans and what do you think of her as an artist?

BO.Dà: Madonna knows very well how to manage herself, she's innovative because she's witty, she is chameleontic and in the process she's also has a great fun doing her job.
She has a refined intelligence that also helped her to develop the artist inside her: How can you not be a Madonna fan?

MT: What do you think about Madonna's musical repertoire? Many detractors claim that in the end it's just a few silly songs, but considering that her material renews itself in time, keeps being played everywhere and that many other artists from different musical backgrounds keep covering her songs, maybe its not that "superficial" after all?

BO.Dà: Only by listening to the lyrics of the songs you understand that there's nothing superficial in their message.
Like A Virgin for example says:

"I made it through the wilderness
Somehow I made it through
Didn't know how lost I was
Until I found you

I was beat incomplete
I've been had, I was sad and blue
But you made me feel
Yeah, you made me feel
Shiny and new

Gonna give you all my love, boy
My fear is fading fast
Been saving it all for you
cause only love can last"

Is there a woman out there who doesn't agree with this? Madonna had and still has the capabililty to send out a message through "popular arrangements", which means they get to the young generation of this century. In the 80's she did it using sounds of those times and the message reached us as teenagers.
If you want to talk to someone and communicate, make people understand you, you have do it using their language. Music, arrangements and sounds are like a code access, a key, that she knows how to use very well.

MT: One of the songs you chose is Paradise (Not For Me). It's a very peculiar song, not only because the way it was born (it was originally a song by Mirwais featuring Madonna that "returned" to her music legacy with the Music album), but also for its misterious and melancholic nature, and thanks to it's dark and criptic video it has become one of the most favourite Madonna songs ever for many fans.

Why did you select Paradise and what about the "trip hop meets tango and musette" reminiscenses you put in it?

BO.Dà: We didn't know it was a fans' favourite! Is that for real? We are happy of that, it means we had a good intuition...
Let's say that Fabio Naponiello suggested it to Deborah Bontempi who, to make it personal, opted for tango and musette, and called Max Tagliata, a very renowned accordion player. They recorded the piano and musette track in one evening.. then the sax solo by Carlo Atti was added and the viola by Tiziano Zanotti completed the job.

MT: You have reworked classis such as Material Girl and Like A Virgin. You made a very slow and almost whispered version of the latter. What did inspire you for this arrangement?

BO.Dà - Deborah: I saw myself catapulted into "Who framed Roger Rabbit", in the scene where sexy and red haired Jessica sings in the smoky club. I tried to recreate that image through music, and further more the lyrics... are about me! They are the perfect lyrics for a ballad.

MT: Another classic, what about La Isla Bonita as a bossa nova?

BO.Dà: That was the first Madonna song to be re-arranged and after seeing that the experiment was successful we kept going on, doing all the others.
As I said before, La Isla Bonita has already some bossa nova in it... it's logical or maybe it is for a musician, that if we were a reggae band we would have turned it into a reggae song!

MT: The album has a sound that recalls the one of a live jam session. Did you record the tracks in just one take or was there the classic studio work with different recording sessions?

BO.Dà: You really got the sense of the record and we are pleased of that! The arrangements took us months of work, then the main Boda quartet moved to Riccione where Daniele Marzi was located and we recorded the record in separate takes but all together, as if we were doing a live show, more or less how records were recorded in the Forties or Fifties.

Once we had the structure of the tracks we invited the various guest musicians in the studio and they performed on them what came up to them at the time, like when you do a solo on a standard song in a jam session.

It's not a coincidence that all the guest musicians and all of us go to the same jazz clubs in the Bologna area to do jam sessions. We were just being ourselves with recording microphones on and on Madonna songs, but in that very moment Madonna was out of the picture, the songs were ballads, bossa novas, swing numbers like the ones you find in a jam session.

MT: Did you have a chance to perform these covers before a live audience and how was their reaction?

BO.Dà: Sure, also because none of us would have immagined to make a record! The project was originally conceived for live shows, then Deborah gave Marco Dubaldo a demo on which there were 5 songs done in studio during rehearsals for a show and we were asked to do the record. We play live a lot and we will keep going on. On our MySpace page you can find dates of our nexts shows.
The audience has a positive response, at first they don't recognize the song right away, then the melody kicks in and they go: "aaaaaaahh!!" It's very funny.

MT: If you should chose One Song from all the Madonna reportoire as your favourite ever, what would that song be?

BO.Dà: Music, the title speaks for itself!

MT: What projects do you have for the near future?

BO.Dà: Playing live, selling records :)

MT: Thanks for sharing your time with our readers!

BO.Dà: Thanks for the opportunity to express ourselves!

For more info about BO.Dà check out their official MySpace page at myspace.com/bodajazz
and their YouTube page at youtube.com/bodajazz.

Images by Davide Proni courtesy of BO.Dà - used by permission.
This interview © 2007 Madonna Tribe.