“In the middle of the sea is an island / in the island there’s a harbour / in the harbour there’s a house / in the house there’s a window / behind the window there’s a woman / who has the sea in her eyes…”
Franca Masu was born in Alghero, Sardinia’s Catalan city, in the bosom of a family highly sensitive to art (her father is the painter Manlio Masu, significant 20th century exponent of the Sardinian school) and music. Gifted with a clear and passionate voice, capable of directly reaching the heart of her listeners, Franca took the autodidactic approach to music, almost by accident, listening to old records by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. After her arrival on the musical scene together with the American clarinettist Tony Scott, who described her as “one of the best vocal talents in Italy”, she soon began to collaborate with important jazz musicians and the Sardinian Jazz Orchestra, singing at prestigious events in Italy and abroad.
From 1997 Franca became interested in her musical roots and developed a passion for the typical sounds expressed in Mediterranean coastal regions, which resonated very closely with her own sensitivity and with which she found a new way of expressing herself by means of a language she had always lived with: ancient Catalan which has survived for centuries in Alghero.
In 2001 Franca Masu surprised the public and critics with El meu viatge, her first recording sung in Catalan, produced by Mark Harris, well known as the arranger for De André and Jannacci. The album was singled out by the SGAE (The General Society of Authors and Publishers of Spain) and by Radio4 of Barcelona with a special mention as the best debut album in the “Premi disc català de l’any 2001”. With Alguimìa, her second record in Catalan, Franca Masu finally found her own personal sound, full of life, poetry and a waft of the Mediterranean. Franca Masu’s Alguimìa, full of love and the sea, combines the rhythms of Catalonia, of Alghero, of Italy with those of Portuguese Fado. This music merges the restless dreams, the passion, the melancholy, the most secret desires of an artist who, from her island of Sardinia, offers her song of life, of love, of coast, of death to the great sea which seduces her on a passionate boundless and borderless “journey”. Catalan critics have defined her as a true revelation “for her capacity to enchant with her strong personality, her crystalline yet at the same time powerful voice…”, “she left us agape at many places during her great concert…” (La Vanguardia). “Franca Masu surprised us with the songs from her first cd El meu viatge… accompanied by a trio of commanding stage presence” (El punt de Girona).
Her artistic expressivity, linked to the profound and passionate way in which her life and music affect her have led this Sardinian artist naturally to embrace other musical genres which co-exist in her: jazz, tango and fado. Franca Masu has headlined such acclaimed and prestigious projects such as Oscar del Barba’s Nuevo Tango, the show “Maria di Lisbona” by Gian Mesturino and Robert North, and “Abba’s Abba” by Gavino Murgia.