Balletto di Bronzo - L’età del bronzo

Balletto di Bronzo, led by the Neapolitan keyboardist-singer-composer Gianni Leone, is one of the Italian “one-shot bands” of progressive rock, and the one that produced the most original work least tied to the British models of the genre. Having left behind the naive beat sound of their first album – Sirio 2222 (1970), which was nonetheless well played, the extremely young Leone — practically a teenager — threw himself into a hugely ambitious work. The concept album YS is inspired by a medieval French tale (“L’Histoire d’YS”) and spills over the physical limits of vinyl (in the CD edition there's no break at all between the two parts). The lyrics are as unsettling as they are incomprehensible, at times naive, moving between mythology and surrealism. The story follows the last surviving living being, who receives a kind of truth from on high along with the task of revealing it to a humanity now made up solely of the living dead, but who pays the price through repeated encounters with a supernatural entity that strips him, one by one, of all his senses, against a backdrop of deranged scenarios reminiscent of Joe D’Amato’s trash-horror films.

The electric organ virtuoso (who on this record also uses spinet, celesta and harpsichord, aptly choosing the right timbre for each moment) lays down a carpet of psychedelic keyboards as the backdrop to a languid vocal delivery that seems to come from beyond the grave, and which to a modern listener sounds somewhat “dated” for its occasional indulgence in a relentless falsetto. These alternate with long passages of frenzied improvisation straddling classical and jazzy territory, with dialogues between harpsichords and guitars underpinned by an effective, far-from-banal rhythm section. The ensemble shows off a technique and interplay rarely expected from such a young band with roots in beat music. The composition unfolds in five parts, and its structure clearly reveals the classical training of the sixteen-year-old leader, with echoes, cross-references, reprises and thematic developments running through this lengthy Italian-made rock opera. The record was released to total indifference at the time and has since become a cult object among genre devotees. The band, however, found neither the motivation nor the drive to repeat the feat, and disbanded.

Recently, given the growing interest sparked in the 1990s by Italian pop music of that era, Gianni Leone put together a new lineup under the name Balletto di Bronzo, which performs the entire suite rearranged so it can also be played without electric guitar. Numerous, quite different versions of this reworking exist too, among which we should mention an English-sung version called Trys, recently released by Mellow Records, who handled the first reissue of the album back in the '90s, as well as various Japanese reissues and the “official” Polygram edition, which differ mainly in packaging and bonus tracks: beat-era songs harking back to the band's earliest work.

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

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