Crêuza de mä

“Crêuza de mä“, I'll say it upfront, is my favorite Italian album of all time. But I'm also aware of the immediate paradox, since it isn't in the Italian language, but in a strange patois ‘ancient’ Genoese that doesn't even exist anymore, if it ever existed at all. Actually, it's more like a fanciful jumble of various Mediterranean languages and phonemes, invented for the occasion, built on a base of Genoese, which for centuries was the lingua franca of trade and sea routes, already incorporating hundreds of words of foreign origin, Islamic ones in particular. The result is a language that Fabrizio describes as “dreamlike”.

In the reissue of the album marking its thirtieth anniversary (edited by Sandro Veronesi) and in "Una Goccia Di Splendore" (the majestic auto-photo-biography edited by Guido Harari), he writes: "Here we are at the songs some call 'pesto tracks'... The language, both musically and lyrically, could be called the language 'of dream', which has little to do with reality... never had the bouzouki been played as a solo instrument before, never had Genoese taken on the character of a Ligurian/Arabic/Turkish tongue. In Genoa itself, someone asked me: 'What language were you singing in?'. I replied: 'In a language of dream that would sound like a shared idiom for all the peoples of the Mediterranean.' That hope, too, obviously turned out to be a dream... I wrote them for many reasons, among them recognizing myself as part of an ethnicity within a much vaster universe, that of the Mediterranean Sea. Also because my compass has always pointed me toward whatever direction was least safe, never the one chosen by the majority — it has always pointed me toward marginal worlds, minorities, departures from the norm, including linguistic ones: those strange sounds, those unusual words that seemed like plucked harp strings, fox calls, the rustle of leaves, are surely closer to the echoes of nature than the words of more cultured languages ever sound..." He closes the thought with a quote drawn from Pasolini: "Dialect is authenticity".

So we know that the Virgil guiding us on this journey is in search of authenticity. And of a dream, an unreality. Perhaps a metaphor, perhaps an imaginary journey. One that sets off from Genoa and heads out beyond Monte di Portofino, and, like Ulysses's voyage, doesn't aim for the landing but for the sailing in between, the people, the places, the encounters. This aura of suspension between reality and dream, and the mixed language, necessarily call for a mixed, hybrid, interwoven, blended music, one able to make you travel the way Salgari's books did when we were children. It too must be an invention. We often talk about melting pot, when mentioning New York or London, New Orleans or Paris, places where everything simmers together in the pot. Think of the Caribbean Sea, where sailing here and there you hear reggae, salsa, cumbia, vallenato, soca, r'n'b from Florida, son, reggaeton, merengue, compass and a few dozen more. But the Mediterranean is the true melting pot original, ten thousand years guaranteed, and still active today.

Genoa is one of the historic capitals of this sea. A city hemmed in between mountains and sea, something to be feared and to be irresistibly drawn to at the same time. Genoa is a Maritime Republic, it's the desire to discover a western route to Japan, it's battles against fierce Saladins, but it's also the carrugi and the port, the alleys that run down from the hills and the city to the sea, it's the terraces carved out of the mountainside and planted with vines, it's trade and encounters and knowledge of distant lands, inhabited by different peoples who share the Mediterranean in common. This journey that runs like a watermark through the album is a tribute to what was the cradle of ancient civilizations: Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Sardinians, Moors, Catalans, Arabs, Turks, Jews, Egyptians. The Sea in which we were born and evolved, layered one upon another, always with that same horizon line to look toward. The melting pot of the Mare Nostrum is extraordinary — pizzica, tarantella, Andalusian music, Moroccan gnawa, Algerian rai, desert blues, classical Arabic music and Corsican polyphonies, Greek Rembetika, Middle Eastern music from Egypt to Syria, Turkish music, Greek music. But to synthesize all this you need someone who truly masters the material. Because it should be stressed that the secular miracle of this record is also the meeting — stars aligned, the perfect moment for both — of Fabrizio De André and Mauro Pagani.

Pagani was the sprite of the Pfm original, flute and violin, who left because he felt too constrained within the prog and, right from the start, a researcher of ethnic music in general, and Arab and Mediterranean music in particular. As early as 1978 he released an album that has the flavor of world music, he worked with Moni Ovadia and the Gruppo Folk Internazionale, took part in a project of medieval instrumental and vocal music with Alia Musica, and with Carnascialia, together with Demetrio Stratos and some musicians from Canzoniere del Lazio, he revived the folk sounds of central and southern Italy. In those years it wasn't easy to get hold of records or cassettes from the four corners of the Mediterranean. Pagani "bulimically" collected this world made up of foreign voices, plucked instruments and all kinds of percussion, folk music and classical music. He learns to play the bouzouki e oud, the Arab lute, buying them at flea markets and shops: theoud – which plays a central role in the sound of the record – he finds at a stall in the Algiers market, made of wood from fruit crates, its rose window a piece of plastic, and it has a "magically wonderful" sound.

The record features many unusual instruments: "Crêuza de mä" opens with a solo on the Macedonian gaida, a kind of bagpipe found throughout the Mediterranean basin. In De André's intent, it acts like a town crier announcing the story. Then come bouzouki and plucked viola. Gradually, the oud appears, of course, but also the shannaj and the Turkish saz and marimba, transverse and cane flute, Andalusian guitar, mandolins, eight-string guitar, along with percussion of every kind, and in "Sinan Capudàn Pascià" even Walter Calloni's drums. This isn't folklore — it's about finding an alchemy between music and words, those clipped words rich in diphthongs and hiatuses that Genoese, according to De André the least Neo-Latin of all Romance languages, can offer.

Another trait of Genoese is the gentleness of its terms. There are some songs that deal with themes in blunt, raw language that, translated into Italian, would sound too harsh, too vulgar. "Jamin-a", the "dark-skinned she-wolf", is a song charged with sensuality, with violent erotic tension, an orgasm: "Jamin-a" "is the companion of an erotic journey that every sailor hopes, indeed expects, to find in every port, after the perilous tacking caused by a hostile sea or a careless captain". Mussa and belìn sound acceptable, whereas their Italian counterparts would be hard to accept in a song. The same goes for the moment in "Crêuza de mä" when it speaks of meeting respectable girls who "ti peu ammiàle senza u gundun" — girls whom (unlike the usual ones, I suppose) you can admire even without a condom. Precisely for this reason, it's remarkable, a linguistic spectacle, to see Fabrizio letting himself go into descriptions he'd never allowed himself before. Ironic as ever, but also sensual, decidedly sexy. And with that voice, no less. An unknown language can work miracles...

If the gaida at the start is the signal to weigh anchor and set off on the journey, know that this won't be a pleasure trip, a geographical one, but a journey of the soul, touching places and people that are symbolic even before they are real. Along ancient routes, like the one leading to Sidon, the Lebanese city where "the alphabet and glass were invented", which De André saw battered under Israeli tanks during the 1982 war. He imagines a father, poor and ragged, holding the body of his dead child in his arms “…ora grumo di sangue orecchie denti da latte/ e gli occhi dei soldati cani arrabbiati con la schiuma alla bocca/ cacciatori di agnelli a inseguire la gente come selvaggina”. It's sung with sparse accompaniment, and it carries a violence, a grief so raw it takes your breath away. Then there's the story of Cicala, the cunning 19-year-old from Genoa captured in a naval battle at Djerba, who saves the ship of his new Turkish masters and, with shrewd opportunism, manages to climb the ranks of Islamic society until he becomes Grand Vizier under the name Sinan Capudan Pascià — the only difference being that now "he curses Mohammed instead of God". Backing it all is a kind of Mediterranean funk unplugged, if I can call it that, the most rhythmic track on the whole album.

There's the figure of 'A Pittima, the man who in Genoese society collected debts on behalf of creditors by any means necessary, and there are the prostitutes of "'A Dumènega", their one day off when they can stroll through the city, insulted and mocked by the bigoted common folk and the self-righteous — one of whom might well be an unwitting husband: all of this set to music that underscores this jumble of shouting and children begging for sghei "to go to the movies". It's a reworking, over a rhythm drawn from centuries-old folk tradition, of the theme of "Bocca Di Rosa", with language here — precisely — masking "the obscenities" of the lyrics. In the end the journey ideally connects back, like a reverse shot, to the departure at the beginning: the sailor who sets off in "Da A Me Riva" sees his wife's white handkerchief waving goodbye from the pier, backlit, and gazes at the small sailing kit in his trunk, “tre camicie di velluto, due coperte un mandolino e un calamaio di legno duro/ e in una berretta nera la tua foto da ragazza per poter ancora baciare Genova/ sulla tua bocca in naftalina”. And off he goes again.

It's not a long journey, in terms of running time, but it's intense and captivating, capable of truly carrying you into another dimension, a sort of inner journey psychedelic natural, swaying, organic. I remember whole afternoons spent swaying to it, alone or with company, on some little boat off the rocky coastline that rises from Portovenere all the way to Zena, beneath the mountains plunging into the sea, that sheer stretch dotted with terraces and little houses which for me is Liguria. That swaying chorus of "Crêuza de mä", "eianda euè….", with the flavour of "a rotten rope of water and salt that binds us and carries us into a crêuza de mä" was our regional anthem. In those afternoons lasting until sunset filled our eyes, it became a Universal Anthem. Musically, an absolute marvel, a masterpiece ante-litteram of that world music which they were exploring in those years David Byrne e Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel e David Bowie. Byrne's admiration is well known for what he considers one of the most important albums of the '80s, unmatched over time (as he reaffirmed 15 years later): this judgment is reinforced by the fact that Byrne had, at the time of "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", envisioned an album that would tell of a people and a language not yet discovered.

It's an album that truly sailed the seas and crossed borders. Sung with "that voice", reflective and dramatic, easygoing and subtly ironic, often all at once. Empathetic. A timeless voice, exactly like the album itself. I'd add that the images Fabrizio evokes, invents, conjures — beyond the "invented" language itself — are extraordinary in their own right: it's travel poetry, it's a testimony of love, it's a longing to have no borders.

To mix reality with fantasy, something he always managed brilliantly. A concept album, like all the albums by this then-44-year-old (in 1984), who chisels every syllable as though it had to be spoken for eternity, as though every word were the final paving stone of a road to be walked. It could be one of those little roads, the Crêuza, that in Liguria divide the fields, and the houses, and always run down toward the sea. De Ma. Or Crêuza like those broad ripples that the wind's breath draws upon the sea, like roads across the water to follow.

Either way, in the seven songs of this album there is truly a world — indeed several worlds — to discover, to be enchanted by, to dream along. To be sailed. It's true that when you set off, even on a musical adventure, you know what you're leaving behind, not what you'll find. Here De André and Pagani, on a modern odyssey, sailed for us too, and brought home the treasure chest buried perhaps in the sand, perhaps among the rocks, of the Mediterranean Sea.