Mike Sponza - Ergo Sum

Italian blues musician Mike Sponza has been involved in an unusually large number of prestigious collaborations. He started the “Kakanic Blues” project in 2005, creating an album that received glowing reviews from around the globe. “Kakanic Blues 2.0” was released three years later, with the participation of 25 musicians from Italy, Austria, Slovenia,
Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Ireland, Great Britain and the United States.

And in 2011, Sponza issued “Continental Shuffle,” featuring musicians from all over Europe exchanging original songs.
2016 brings yet another collaboration for Sponza. He recorded his latest album, Ergo Sum -- the title is Latin for "Therefore I am" -- at London's famed Abbey Road Studios, with two very special guests: the legendary British blues vocalist Dana Gillespie, whose career dates back to the 1960s, and the multiple Blues Music Award-nominated guitarist and vocalist Ian Siegal, who has worked with such deep-rooted American blues acts as Jimbo Mathus and North Mississippi Allstars.
Reviews of Sponza's recordings and live performances have been universally enthusiastic. He's one of a small number of musicians able to play the blues by observing and feeling, deeply, everything that happens around him. He seems to have an innate capacity of seeing beyond conventions and patterns, finding new ways to express himself that expand the blues genre rather than confine it.

"Human passions have no age," Sponza writes in the liner notes to Ergo Sum. "I've discovered there's a trait d'union between the ancient poems of Catullus, Horatius, Martialis, Juvenalis and the lyrics of Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan. In a thousand years, the questions will be the same: It could be love, friendship, politics, family ... and I'm sure the
answers will be the same, too. Because man will never change. Luckily."