Alan Sorrenti - Bel canto between prog and the discotheque

Alan Sorrenti is a Naples-based singer-songwriter of Welsh descent, best known to most for his more commercial work (dance-style tracks like the hit "Figli delle stelle" or melodic pop songs like the massively successful "L'unica donna per me"). But in the years when "Pawn Hearts" by Van der Graaf Generator sat at number one in Italy for months, selling over 800,000 copies, Sorrenti was also, and above all, a refined rock singer-songwriter with a clear psychedelic/progressive bent, one that many saw as directly inspired by the work of Tim Buckley or Peter Hammill. The rapid shifts in Italian pop and, according to accounts from the time, the onset of vocal problems that prevented him from pulling off certain vocal acrobatics, especially live, led him to change course.

At first he attempted the noble but crowded path of serious interpretation of classic Neapolitan song on the self-titled LP, but it was a field where he faced far weightier rivals (Murolo, for instance, had gathered the best of 600 years of popular and classical tradition — Donizetti, Bellini, Mercadante and Vincenzo Galilei are among the authors of these timeless classics — in an encyclopedic, philological work titled "Napoletana" just ten years earlier), and his Hammill-esque vocal style sat awkwardly with pieces that, by tradition, demanded a lyrical delivery. He then ventured into the career everyone knows him for, enjoying a very brief spell of commercial success: his songs became the "tormentone" of a couple of Italian summers before he faded from memory. Having gone from being Harvest's leading Italian artist and a touring accompanist for Pink Floyd, he went down in history as the king of the discos, resurrected a few years ago for a dispiriting appearance alongside Cugini di Campagna and other dubious figures from the Italian pop scene of the '70s, on a Claudio Baglioni TV special devoted to '70s nostalgia.

A long, self-titled suite plus three songs make up his debut album Aria (1972), a masterpiece of Italian pop. The record boasts an exceptional cast of musicians, chief among them the star turn of Jean Luc Ponty (the jazz violinist trained under Grappelli and the recognizable virtuoso on orchestral masterworks by Zappa and the Mahavishnu Orchestra), who makes a crucial contribution to the suite that fills the entire first side of the record. Drawing on themes dear to Italian progressive rock (dark-fantasy settings complete with castles, monasteries, forests and broad fields of grass, the love between a knight and his princess, the idea of a dream or hallucination in which the author loses himself), Sorrenti builds an atmosphere that draws the listener in immediately, from Nazzaro and Paratore's Spanish-tinged guitar arpeggios to the sudden vocalizations accompanied by free-jazz flourishes from Albert Prince's piano and spare violin phrasing. The ambiguities underpinning the lyrics (the duality of aria as atmosphere/as the name of the beloved woman) carry the listener into a chaotic, elusive world that culminates in a final erotic delirium ("sono io il tuo corpo/sono io l'universo/nel tuo fiume sto scivolando/aria sto impazzendo"), where a long, frenzied violin solo, with virtuosity worthy of the player, and Tony Esposito's rhythmic explosion bring the protagonist back to reality ("io sento che io io io io/io ti sto/io ti sto perdendo"). To give just an idea of the suite's vocal style, each "io" lasts around 6-7 seconds, and throughout the piece variations recur on every vowel stretched out obsessively, with remarkable use of dynamics within a single word, yet always in service of the needs of the lyrics and the music. The hallucinatory atmospheres are rendered in a way that never feels excessive or "dated" (as happens, for instance, with "YS" by Balletto di Bronzo), but is handled with restraint throughout — which explains the remarkable allure the suite still holds today, 30 years on.

The second side, not as memorable as "Aria" but still of the highest caliber, opens with a more relaxed passage and a less "extreme," more soothing vocal approach on the aching folk ballad "Vorrei incontrarti," before closing things out with the lysergic "La mia mente" and "Un fiume tranquillo," the latter harking back to a more traditional symphonic style. At the time many heard echoes of Buckley or Hammill in this work, and they weren't wrong (the long vocalization that closes the record is nothing less than a clear homage to the Californian singer-songwriter, almost sounding like a sample of "Starsailor"), but it would be a mistake to reduce the album to a mere rehash of Buckley's vocal style without acknowledging the artist's own original contribution. Sorrenti's singing differs both because of technical limitations (his range was nothing extraordinary) and for expressive reasons, and comes across instead as a modern evolution of the vocal style typical of Neapolitan song, with all those drawn-out vowels (especially at the end of lines) held for several seconds with bold, effective modulations; nor is it wrong to detect echoes of certain elements typical of the "bel canto" tradition. Perhaps even Rocchi's astonishing, little-known suite "Volo magico numero 1" can be considered a muse for this work. The only flaws are a few naive moments in the lyrics, though these blend well with the record's atmosphere and never feel out of place within the whole.

Like an old incense burner at dawn in a deserted village (1973), Alan Sorrenti's second record, features Tony Esposito on drums and percussion and David Jackson of Van Der Graaf Generator on flute. Given the huge commercial and critical success of the first album, Harvest pushed the musician to produce another one in short order, once again providing him with session players of considerable caliber. Less inspired than its predecessor, the album has more balanced lyrics but lacks memorable moments, aside from the gorgeous love song "Serenesse" (perhaps his finest track) and the excellent psychedelic ballad "Angelo." The title suite opens with a long (10-minute) psychedelic/free-jazz introduction, featuring vocal improvisations over a bed of VCS3 and slide guitar, before continuing for another ten minutes with an obsessive, monotonous chant that will disappoint anyone hoping for the lyrical flights and atmospheres of "Aria." For collectors, it's worth noting that the reissue added the interesting single "Le tue radici" as a bonus track.

On his third album Alan Sorrenti (1974), the artist reworks, in an original and irreverent key, the Neapolitan classic "Dicitencello Vuje," which cracks the Italian Top 10.

A year later, Alan, back from an adventurous trip to Africa that revealed to him the communicative power of rhythm, decided to fly across the ocean to California with his producer Corrado Bacchelli, to give his music a new face. In San Francisco he recorded his fourth album Sienteme it's time to land (1976), with a local "fusion" band that would accompany him on tour for a series of concerts in Italy, arranged for the occasion by Mark Isham, the renowned American film composer.

Back from the tour, Sorrenti settled in Los Angeles, where he would live for five years. There he met West Coast musicians including Jay Graydon, at the time Al Jarreau's producer. Not long after, the legendary Californian guitarist would produce Alan Sorrenti's most successful album, Figli delle stelle (1977), which sold over a million copies in Italy alone, with Corrado Bacchelli as executive producer and pianist David Foster contributing. The title track, "Figli delle stelle," buoyed by a catchy riff and a funky-disco groove, topped the charts and became one of the anthems of Italian dance music.

But for critics and die-hard early fans, it was a "betrayal." Only after several years would "Figli delle stelle" find proper reappraisal, including among younger generations.

The single most popular song of Sorrenti's "lighter" period, however, is the ballad "Tu sei l'unica donna per me," released two years later and the reigning hit of the summer of 1980, crowned with a win at Festivalbar. It was an international hit, climbing the charts across Europe, especially in Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia. The song was included on the album L.A.&N.Y (EMI, 1979), produced in California by the same team behind Figli delle stelle, as was the following album Di Notte (EMI, 1980), driven up the charts by the new easy-listening ballad "Non so che darei," which would be put forward as Italy's entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Sorrenti's transformation from avant-garde singer to star of Italian easy listening was thus complete. As early as the following single, "La strada brucia" — included on the album Angeli di strada (1982) — Sorrenti showed signs of impatience with the commercial label he'd been saddled with, and set off on a kind of "ethnic-spiritual journey," which would take shape in the mystical "Non si nasce mai una volta sola" (from the 1986 album Bonno Soku Bodai) and his subsequent conversion to the "True Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin."

A few years later Sorrenti returned to London, where he re-recorded most of his best-known songs with new arrangements for a work titled Radici (1992), and began exploring the new international music scene, crossing paths with some members of Planet Funk, with whom he made two new singles: the first, "Kyoko mon amour," was released on the compilation Miami (1996), while the second, "Paradiso Beach," taken from the more recent album Sottacqua (2003), brought him back, after years away, into the commercial circuit of radio networks.

In 2013, 36 years after the release of the original track, Sorrenti revisited "Figli delle stelle" with an international remake, courtesy of American DJ Little Louie Vega, a guru of American house music, in a duet with Cape Verdean vocalist Anane.

An operation that paves the way for a new album, slated for release on an independent label in 2014, built around a "global crossover" of styles and genres.

In 2022 came the surprise return with Oltre la zona sicura, an album that's surprising in a number of ways, showing Sorrenti in excellent vocal shape, serving up sinuous funky-dance numbers like the single "Giovani per sempre" (nomen omen!), which updates the hypnotic hook of "Figli delle stelle" with a 2000s-style production, the sparkling (and ironic) "Oggi" and the equally mocking "Inversione di tendenza", but also infectious 80s synth-pop revivalism ("Pura vida") and unpredictable leaps into psychedelia (the acoustic "Luce magica"), while "Oltre la zona sicura" offers perhaps the most experimental moments, with eccentric arrangements supporting the Neapolitan singer's fine voice, who doesn't shy away from grounding his lyrics in current affairs on tracks like "Gli altri siamo noi", "Naufraghi in fiamme" and "Greta" (dedicated to Greta Thunberg).

Helping ferry Alan "beyond the safe zone", poised between the dancefloor and Jamiroquai, is also the production work of Ceri, already behind the desk for Frah Quintale and Franco 126, one of the names who has most influenced the Italian sound of recent years.

A welcome return, then, for a figure never quite fully appreciated in Italian music of the last fifty years.

(In collaboration with: http://tonysuper.altervista.org/)

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