Mina Mazzini - Seventy Years of History in a Single Voice

A voice can be an invention. A voice can be a discovery. I think of Cathy Berberian in the avant-garde. I think of Callas and how she changed the very idea of melodrama. And I think of Mina. There was something in common in the way they conceived of the voice, even as experiment.

(Luigi Pestalozza)

But who was this Pestalozza? A thoroughly approachable gentleman with whom I shared, 20 years ago, a few hours of conversation about electronic music (historically regarded as the fruit of research aimed at producing weapons) and about the voice of Demetrio Stratos, which he described as that of a man who "invented nothing". The contemporary classical critic who, as biographer, followed the entire human and artistic story of Luigi Nono (himself the author of plenty of electronic music), and who suddenly decided to turn his attention to... Mina ("Mina. Una forza incantatrice" by Franco Fabbri and Luigi Pestalozza, 1998).

Who is Mina? Well... anyone in Italy aged 30-40 or over will certainly have an answer, though how many, beyond the die-hard devotees, have actually explored her immense discography is another matter. As for just how much of a rock artist Mina can be, for anyone who hasn't already done so, try listening to her sing Afterhours; or as the young "Baby Gate" grappling with rock'n'roll, or as an interpreter of symphonic pop on "Non è Francesca" from 1975, "Musica" and above all "Voglio stare bene", both from 1980, even post-punk on "Capisco" (also 1980) - and then tell me what you think.

A Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the absolute record-holder for time spent on the Italian charts, admired by Maria Callas, Mirella Freni, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Antony and the Johnsons, Mónica Naranjo, Liza Minnelli, Luciano Pavarotti, to name just a few among thousands of names from the worlds of popular music, opera and jazz (the greatest Italian musicians have praised her by working with her over the decades, from Roberto Gatto to Paolo Fresu, Franco Cerri, Danilo Rea, Renato Sellani, Antonio Faraò, Ellade Bandini), and internationally too (Toots Thielemans) - from the 1960s onward, Mina Mazzini is the woman who has sung, with varying results, sometimes thrilling, sometimes merely decent, in a few cases unlistenable, pretty much "everything" (around 1,600 songs). She has done so by releasing, from 1960 onward, anywhere from one to three albums a year, for a total of 116, sung in Italian (dialects included), English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Turkish and Japanese. She is considered the greatest Italian singer of all time and one of the greatest in the world, even though, due to her fear of flying (as she herself has said), she only ever left Italy in the early 1960s (Spain, Japan, Venezuela, the Olympia in Paris, Argentina, Switzerland), before withdrawing from the public eye to live a private life in Lugano. Louis Armstrong once said of her: "She is the greatest white singer in the world"; Sarah Vaughan added: "If I didn't have my voice, I'd want to have that of a young Italian girl named Mina"; Liza Minnelli concluded: "She is simply the greatest of all".

Her voice has been that of a coloratura soprano (now mezzo-soprano, but in any case always an "extended voice"), capable of moving across a three-octave range (and then some). A voice rich in an inestimable wealth of overtones, which have given her - and still give her, at 78 years of age - an uncommon power and an indescribable range of nuance. This, combined with her original gifts as a brilliant singer (a quality well suited to her career as an entertainer), soon led her to become a highly dramatic interpreter, comparable in this only to the esteemed Mia Martini and her fellow traveller Milva, though more capable than anyone else in a highly cultivated repertoire - not within the structures of the song form, which has often made her sound ironic, but a little too "out of time" and, not infrequently, embarrassing. Mina, on the other hand, has distinguished herself above all in the field of vocal jazz ("adult pop"), of which she has been an absolute master, using her voice as an instrument capable of a thousand shades, imitating wind instruments, albeit often (though thankfully not always) with a touch too much self-indulgence in her mannered, affected pronunciation and her drawn-out phrasing - something that has, unfortunately, earned her the dubious title of "queen of birignao" (vocal affectation), and which, in rock circles, has made her anything but loved by certain fellow musicians. I recall the terse comment of one of the founding fathers of Italian progressive rock, who, to my disbelieving ears, described her as "a vulgar old cow, only capable of screaming"...

Such close attention nonetheless shows that, even amid the very rare mockery - often actually stemming from the rejection of songs sent to Lugano, which the singer herself selects from among thousands, and whose publication would guarantee a comfortable pension to whoever wrote them - Mina remains a unique case in the world and, in many respects, without equal.

Baby Gate, a rockstar on TV

The year is 1958. Italy is in the midst of its “economic boom” after the ruins left by the Second World War, which had ended little more than a decade earlier. This is the Italy of the Christian Democrats, the Italy that sees the triumph at the Eurovision Song Contest of the “new singer-songwriter song”, with Domenico Modugno’s “Nel blu dipinto di blu”. Television is “state-run” and there is only one channel, Rai 1. It’s a rigidly black-and-white television, one that doesn’t just bring entertainment but aims at literacy (in the South, the 1951 general census recorded an average rate of 26/27%) with programmes like “Non è mai troppo tardi”, hosted by teacher Alberto Manzi. The “new music” entering Italian homes draws its inspiration from what’s happening in the United States, in a jazz idiom understood as a mass phenomenon capable of getting feet moving. Backed by a cultural grounding built on listening to Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley — almost all of whom would later become her admirers — Anna Maria Mazzini makes her debut on the stage of the Bussola in Marina di Pietrasanta at just eighteen, no small feat for a woman in those years.

In no time at all, the young singer becomes the voice of a band called Happy Boys: audience response is immediate, so much so that she herself becomes the main attraction under the stage name Baby Gate. It’s not jazz driving her in these first dizzying steps, but the rock’n’roll of “Be Bop a Lula” (Adriano Celentano had landed on these shores just a few months earlier). Her television debut comes on Mario Riva’s “Il Musichiere”, followed by “Canzonissima”, Sanremo, her first, massive worldwide hit with “Il cielo in una stanza” (1960), written by Gino Paoli, world tours, Antonello Falqui’s “Studio Uno”, and then... her private life. Mina is Italy’s first true “rockstar”, a disruptor of social norms. She wears bold make-up, dons miniskirts, smokes, and more: she takes up with the still-married Corrado Pani while pregnant with her beloved Massimiliano. The public “forgives” her for any conduct and crowns her a bearer of new attitudes, social as much as musical. From this point on, Mina becomes a pure “institution”, the absolute emblem of Italian television as a whole and, with it, of a constantly evolving culture broadcast to the public over the airwaves. All of culture, both entertainment and the more properly highbrow kind.

A first farewell to the stage is announced in 1972, the definitive one comes in 1978. In fact, Mina never really abandoned her devotees. True to her “Caroselli” heritage, the TV ad for Tassoni cedrata has become a decades-long classic, and her voice still lends itself to advertising to this day. Not only that: in 2001 the singer returns to her audience via the internet, with a video that will reach the record figure of 20 million views. An extensive release bringing “Mina in Studio” into Italian homes on DVD will become a bestseller. Mina answers reader columns in Italian magazines, sits at the top of the charts... Mina is there, always, regardless.

What can be said of this “alien”? (Maeba). First of all, like anyone who started their career between the late '50s and early '60s, she was too tied to the idea of the 45 single as a promotional tool for a career path. One had to wait until the end of the '60s to start hearing a true vocalist and records of real worth. Few, honestly very few, but also very beautiful.

The diva's career is scattered with stunning songs, shining in numbers ranging from 1 to at most 4-5 per album (do the math: 116 albums for an average of two or three songs each...), which has made her legacy something tied to her vocal metamorphoses, to plot twists in repertoire choices (dreadful to hear her sing Michael Jackson...), but not to any will to create “The” masterpiece. Her best work was never the grab-bag collections of songs from different authors, but the records with a clear, unified artistic vision.

And yet, despite this, her magnetic stage presence and the power of her performances, especially live, have made her immortal. An all the more curious case for someone who, for 40 years now, has no longer set foot on a stage, except “virtually”.

Chapter I: Mina live

Only three live albums were released, all three recorded at the Bussola club. That is, if we exclude the magnificent CD included with the DVD box set “I miei preferiti – Gli anni Rai”, preceded by the equally essential but extremely limited-edition “Signori.. Mina!” from 1993, bundled with the magazine Raro, audio-only, but comprehensive enough to gather the entire archive of her live recordings for Rai, spanning jazz (with versions of “In The Mood” and “Lullaby Of Birdland” that leave you stunned by a scat technique developed to its fullest technical potential), Latin music, pop song, musical theatre, opera arias (“Mi chiamano Mimì”), contemporary classical (with Astor Piazzolla), French chanson, folk, and guest appearances of the highest calibre.

The first of these live albums at the Bussola (Mina alla Bussola Live) dates from 1968. It's a little gem of already international calibre, with Mina's voice crystal-clear, that of a brilliant singer, the echo of Baby Gate, her debut stage name, still lingering. The opening track, fittingly carefree, reworks a classic of South American song by Vinicius de Moraes and is followed by “Regolarmente”. Both are no more than pleasant episodes, tied to the image of the Mina of “Canzonissima”. “Cry” is the first of the essential episodes among her recordings at the Versilia venue. Here Mina is a first-rate jazz singer, soaring from one octave to another, right up to a thrilling closing high note. Too much “virtuosity” instead makes “Un colpo al cuore” hard to follow today. “Se stasera sono qui” is flawless, except that, listening to it, it sounds as if sung by an American still learning Italian, which can be irritating, though it's certainly a song with no dramatic pretensions, however beautiful. Cleaner and better arranged is the lovely “C’è più samba”, penned by Chico Buarque De Hollanda. “La voce del silenzio” is certainly a classic of her output, but this isn't its finest version, seasoned as it is with mannerisms ill-suited to the song's simple nature. The following track passes by without leaving a trace; quite another matter is “Allegria”, bolstered by an excellent arrangement (along with “Cry” and, if you like, the Luigi Tenco song, the best moment on the record). Closing things out is the shapeshifting “Deborah”, by Paolo Conte, again with a few excesses too many.

In short, the record of a fine singer, but not yet of a complete interpreter. Almost all of her peers from the same generation would have stopped at this stage, from Rita Pavone to Iva Zanicchi, via Ornella Vanoni and Patty Pravo, but the same holds true for more recent voices, from Renga to Nek, Giorgia, Alexia, Marco Mengoni, Amalia Grè, Giusy Ferreri, Piero Pelù, Anna Oxa... There's a distinctly Italian affliction worth noting here (even the early Demetrio Stratos wasn't entirely immune to it), namely seeking distinctiveness through “a flaw amplified beyond belief”. Instead of “paring the voice down to its essence”, it gets loaded up with affectations of diction, pronunciation and character that kill nobility rather than creating added value.

This isn't the case with the Mina who's about to come, not entirely at least, because the second Bussola chapter, just 4 years later, will find her at the peak of her interpretive powers and with no missteps in the choice of setlist (easy to argue with hindsight...).

Here is where Mina is born, the one we know today; it's on these recordings that her entire legend can be built.

Dalla Bussola is the name of the record, cut with the help of a big band (less elegant than the one on the previous live album), loosely dubbed an “orchestra” (as in the old dance halls), made up of some of the greatest Italian jazz musicians of the era, handling arrangements that are never too intrusive, with solid harmonic choices, but never especially refined when compared to what America could offer at the time. The undisputed star is Mina's voice, here at the peak of its technical and expressive maturity, not an instrument among instruments, but an instrument that bends the others to its service. This particular trait is captivating here; in almost all the records to follow it will become a source of tedium.

A voice capable of crystalline or breathy high notes, intense low notes, jazz phrasing, dragged or rhythmic, an unheard-of breath control, moving from the huskiest timbres to pop-soprano tones, without even needing to slip into an “operatic” mask. Here lies the true primer of vocal technique. There's nothing to discard.

The idea of blending an internationally-minded repertoire with Italian singer-songwriter fare works perfectly thanks to the jazzy arrangements applied throughout.

The highlights are two Italian songs from the repertoire, the incredible versions of “Fiume azzurro” and “Io e te da soli” (the latter featured only on the 2012 remastered fortieth-anniversary edition, warmly recommended), plus the gorgeous “You've Made Me So Very Happy”.

But there's nothing here that doesn't deserve praise. Beautiful versions of “Someday (You Want Me To Want You)” and “Fly Me To The Moon”, a moving “E penso a te” (with the singer climbing the octaves to hit a pinpoint high F5!), and a strikingly dark reworking of “Io vivrò senza te” (which in part recalls her version of “Deborah”). From the lovely medley leading into the closing “Io e te da soli”, a towering version of “Insieme” also stands out. “Laia Ladaya” veers into South American territory and delivers the most playful side of Mina, yet with sharp intelligence and undeniable interpretive presence.

A document worth owning regardless of musical taste or personal leanings, in the 2012 edition, DVD included.

The third live record, again recorded at the Bussola (Mina Live '78), as well as her most critically acclaimed album (ranked 81st among the “most beautiful Italian records of all time” by Rolling Stone Italy) and the one most loved by audiences — here whipped into pure frenzy — would seek out an even more international dimension, yet an exasperatingly uneven one. A dimension that alternates very bright moments: the spine-tingling opening of “Stasera io qui” (recorded in the studio) by Ivano Fossati, and, by the same author, “Non può morire un'idea”, “Margherita” by Riccardo Cocciante, with much darker shadows: the dreadful “We Are The Champions”, the comically off vocal delivery of “Stayin' Alive”, the MILF-ish sensuality (an element that from the mid-Seventies onward would become a constant, not without a commendable touch of self-irony) of “L'importante è finire”, “Amante amore”, “Ancora tu” and the thoroughly sloppy “El Porompompero”, plus an ugly version of “Città vuota” that sounds like it came straight out of Carrà's repertoire. All of this adds up to a still decent document, in my view far inferior to Dalla Bussola, also due to some vocal trouble encountered on tour (the thickening of the vocal cords is evident on listening) — the last live show before… her retirement. The “problem” with this record, sorry to say, is the singer. Save for a few episodes, Mina here oversings in a mannered and at times vulgar way, not unlike her “fake rival” Milva's take on “Uomini addosso” a decade later (note: “Milfa” is the nickname Franco Battiato jokingly uses for Milva, by his own admission).

But let's focus on the best moments. A standout is “Lacrime napulitane”, proof that this woman needs nothing more than her voice and, when required, a single instrument. That Mina can handle jazz is well known, and whole treatises could be written on the subject — a thoroughly enjoyable “Georgia On My Mind” makes you think the singer should have devoted herself exclusively to that genre. Inferior to their studio counterparts are “Emozioni”, “I giardini di marzo”, and the nasal-toned “Sì viaggiare”…

Chapter II: Mina in the studio

Among her studio output — without taking anything away from the earlier records, all of which featured several genuinely valuable songs, something that in the future would no longer be an essential prerequisite — there's the formal perfection of Mina Canta O Brasil from 1970. A truly fine piece of work, with the splendid “Todas Mulheres Do Mundo” and “Cancao Latina”, though nothing here is negligible, from the most festive numbers (the re-arranged version of “La banda” is genuinely remarkable) to the more melancholic ones. A lovely moment.

Minacantalucio (1975) would reveal every facet of the artist, thanks to the colours of the arrangements and artistic direction by the young Gabriel Yared (one of the many discoveries made by Mina the talent-scout) — decades before the composer would win an Oscar for the score of “The English Patient”. Highly sophisticated, avant-garde arrangements full of personality, paired with a voice that forgoes all self-indulgence, opening the gates of Paradise on the recording of “I giardini di marzo”, showing itself fragile and defenceless against the atonal (!) arrangement of “Non è Francesca”, a masterpiece worthy of being performed in the temples of contemporary classical music, all the way to the gradual hypnosis of “29 Settembre” (a genuine surreal transfiguration), the vivid colours of “Il nostro caro Angelo”, the intensity of “L'Aquila”. A small, great gem, as well as the most successful tribute to Lucio Battisti.

The masterpiece, in this writer's opinion, comes with Mina Almost Jannacci (1977). Not only that — it's in my view the finest work by Enzo Jannacci as a songwriter, who, having dropped the jester's mask, reveals himself in all his weaknesses, but also in his greatness as a narrator of a humanity only seemingly on the margins. What is told here is an everyday life that belonged to everyone forty years ago just as it belongs to us today, with no discount whatsoever and no polishing to add glitter to a life loved and defended tooth and nail, yet viewed with horror, placed under a lens that exposes its bitterness.

The singing here is perfect, celestial even amid the drama. “Rino” truly tears at the soul, but “Vincenzina davanti la fabbrica”, “La sera che partì mio padre”, “Vita vita” (with its perfectly judged avant-leaning arrangement), “E sa vé” are no less powerful, as is the playfulness of “Saxophone”. In “Sfiorisci bel fiore” it's a folk melody that moves you, amid splendid vocal harmonies. But everything here carries enormous socio-cultural weight. Jannacci speaks in simple, utterly simple words that go straight to the heart. He talks about alcoholism, depression, working-class alienation, death in war, loves that ended or never even began — he tells his whole story. It's the record that neither he nor Mina would ever make again. Dark, contrite, even cynical. His melodies, like those of Piero Ciampi, can be as simple as they are deeply sophisticated, even when they veer into the most mocking irony. This is exactly what Signora Mazzini needed: someone to tailor a record around her, just as Fossati would later do for Mia Martini with “Danza”, and the aforementioned Ciampi would do for Nada with “Ho scoperto che esisto anch'io”. The arrangements seem flawless throughout, with the exception of the ambitious “Ecco tutto qui”, whose piano phrasing (certainly surprising) draws on the minimalism of Philip Glass, with a few excesses of brass and progressively fractured rhythms — a genuine gamble, considering the melody is graceful but too simple for so much sonic material piled on top; a venial sin, but not an unpleasant one.

A record that borders on perfection, a milestone that caresses genres even as it transcends them, a greyed treasure chest to be opened with care, like a diary left behind in an attic — the story of a living Italy that is part of everyday life today, but which, in music, sadly no longer exists.

Just a brief mention for Attila (1979), which presented itself as an ambitious, free-spirited creation (starting with the choice to release a double LP, yet another one, and not even the last, following a series that began in 1972), a huge seller, but certainly not a good record, with only “Don't Take Your Love Away” by Isaac Hayes — a track running close to 10 minutes — and some dance-funk numbers sung superbly (“Shadow Of My Old Road”), plus the poignant but overly shouted “Un po' di più”, standing out. This is also the record marking the start of a continuous decline, the odd gasp of life aside, of the one-album-a-year, single-or-double routine, from which little or nothing is worth salvaging.

A decline that would hit rock bottom with the revisiting of classical arias on Sulla tua bocca lo dirò (2009), a colossal flop, especially when compared with the work of Alice, Giuni Russo, Antonella Ruggiero and Milva (with Berio, Piazzolla, and the Brechtian repertoire). A work utterly lacking in elegance.

What else is there? Kyrie (1980), of course! It's an uneven album but one with moments of genuine quality, ushering in the new decade in a way that's as unexpected as it is welcome, through authentic experimentation. Above all, “Musica”, with its sprawling, dreamlike textures, but also the deeply noble “Quattr'ore 'e tiempo” by Stradella, the dazzlingly acrobatic and decidedly prog “Voglio stare bene”, “I Know You”, and “Capisco”, built on spoken word and post-punk, which recall Cccp before they'd even gone to print, yet is credited to a very young Massimiliano Pani (!). There's also room for an orchestral, enchanting version of “She's Leaving Home”, which only she could sing like that. This is an album of consistently medium-to-high quality, undermined by a second chapter that's clearly inferior — the only one, among the “collections” of songs by various authors without a unifying concept, that holds up, thanks in part to crystalline arrangements and production. Not only that: Mina's singing here is genuinely formidable. Of course, as mentioned, there's more than a little that's forgettable, and the electronic drums, here and there, grate with their cloying excess.

Naples (the first of two volumes, dated 1996) delivers arrangements of priceless refinement and spine-tingling vocal performances, with the singer edging toward the vocal research tout court of Demetrio Stratos and Giuni Russo (who would later have harsh words for her, following the release of her version of "Nada te turbe," featured on "Dalla Terra"), singing like a muezzin on "Maruzzella," while also stirring deep emotion on the gorgeous "Core 'ngrato," backed by a stunning string choir.

The aforementioned Dalla Terra (2000) is a solid mystical effort, barring a few episodes, including the opening "Magnificat" by Frisina, a composition far too lightweight to carry the weight of the song selection that follows (years in the making), which is of a wholly different caliber and shines with a magnificent rendition of "Pianto della Madonna," for voice and piano alone (Danilo Rea...), pure perfection. We're in a dimension whose only link to the popular is true nobility, as is also the case with "Voi ch'amate lo Criatore."

The madrigal "Dulcis Christe" is captivating, and "Quando corpus morietur" is moving, even if here and there what's missing is vocal lightness, weighed down by age, with the recurring word "depression" surfacing from the interviews, and far, far too many cigarettes.

L'allieva, from 2005, is a thoroughly enjoyable, but never reverential, tribute to the great Frank Sinatra. A deeply intimate swing record, cut live in the studio with an exceptional jazz quartet (Alfredo Golino, Massimo Moriconi, Danilo Rea, Andrea Braido). The singer is utterly convincing in the most hushed renditions ("These Foolish Things"), and in the outstanding "The Nearness of You" (above all), "All The Way," "Good-Bye," "Angel Eyes," relying on interpretive nuance and the shadings of her instrument rather than sheer power, reaching peaks of crystalline sonic purity. Curious, yet not without charm, is the almost spoken-word version of "My Way."

Only in the last three tracks is the vocal partly set free, backed by an orchestra conducted by Gianni Ferrio, and here it's "April In Paris" that shines brightest. This is a record to be listened to without the itch to draw comparisons with the originals (something Italian critics have inevitably done), given the enormous gap in interpretive intent at its core, as if these were songs being recorded for the very first time. Needless to say, but from this chapter onward, more than ever, Mina reveals her true self: that of a refined and significant jazz interpreter, the formative mother of all the great ladies of Afro-American vocal language in Italy, Tiziana Ghiglioni above all.

Chapter III: The compilations, the songs

For those who love compilations, besides the one mentioned earlier (an extremely limited pressing) from the Rai archives, curated by Mina herself, and the sadly out-of-print Signori... Mina!, the recommended choice is the double anthology Del mio meglio 1 + Del mio meglio 2, simply titled Minantologia, which is far more than a mere string of tracks, but a genuine selection spanning studio cuts, alternate takes and live recordings. A fine collection.

So is, in a more complete form, including live extras and lesser-known tracks, The Collection 3.0. The latest anthology, Paradiso (Lucio Battisti Songbook), dedicated to her deep artistic bond with the visionary bard of Poggio Bustone, is not only an essential compendium of an entire culture, but also offers a marvelous rendition of "Vento nel vento," arranged by Rocco Tanica (Elio e le Storie Tese).

A single worth owning? For lovers of Italian beat, without a doubt the flawless "Un anno d'amore/ E se domani."

And then, how many other beautiful songs are there? From her earliest steps to today, here's my ideal playlist, made up of tracks that no collection could ever fully capture, since it also includes material that is "far from easy listening" and often "on the margins," yet enough to add up to a Story that is unique and, as such, unrepeatable. Yes, because it's sad to say, but in music far more than in life, there are "stories and Stories," and Mina's is made up chiefly of songs.

"Be Bop A Lula" opens this selection. The version by Mina/Baby Gate and the Happy Boys is no different from what other artists around the world were doing at the time. If anything, it's well played, but completely lacking the original virulence of rock'n'roll, only gaining momentum in a few live performances. The singer's voice sharply articulates the consonants, shows weak harmonics in the low frequencies and a rather imperfect diction (her co-star Celentano, singing tracks like this, even invents words outright). Still, it comes across as joyful and carefree, and in its own way mirrors an Italy searching for new forms of expression, eager to give young people a reason to let loose through dance. Looking back today, the leap from the dance hall to rock seems simple enough, but it was far from immune to resistance from those no longer young, defending their turf with arrogance. It's the public itself that calls for this need, and a very young Mina becomes its spokesperson. There's no trace of "bel canto" here, even though Nilla Pizzi and Claudio Villa were "the" institutions of the day. An unpolished step, yet an important one, worthy of historical interest.

Just a year later, preceded by an avalanche of singles, "Tintarella di Luna" becomes a genuine phenomenon, reaching the top of the charts and delivering the first true classic of the singer's catalogue, who, having dropped the pseudonym Baby Gate, becomes known to everyone simply as Mina. The track is homegrown Italian rock'n'roll, a manifesto of lightness but also of inventive songwriting. The well-known driving theme alternates with a first variation opening "gracefully," marrying beat and melody that's both open and buoyant, as Modugno had taught. The voice already sounds different. Falsetto passages, mediated from rock'n'roll (pop critics spoke of "urlatori," or "screamers"), carry a certain theatrical emphasis rooted in Italian cabaret from the 1930s onward (Ettore Petrolini and above all Lelio Luttazzi); the harmonic richness has grown, and so has her sense of rhythm. As was customary, the vocal delivery doesn't shy away from mock "Anglo-Saxon" cadences. The band, for its part, indulges in fine electric guitar and sax solos, helping turn the track into a true little gem. Here's a delightful period video clip, taken from the musicarello (a comedy film with extensive musical numbers, in the vein of Elvis Presley's movies) "Jukebox – Urli d'amore," directed by Mauro Morassi.

It's in 1960, however, that her repertoire is enriched by two vivid masterpieces, each with very different aims: "Una zebra a pois" and "Il cielo in una stanza."

"Una zebra a pois" is a true miracle. A track co-written by Lelio Luttazzi himself, it boasts an arrangement worthy of the greatest classics of the American songbook. The intro is pure romance, the verse carries the thunderous Afro-American rhythmic emphasis of mambo, opening onto swing variations and childlike nursery-rhyme rhythms. All of this is far more than a stylistic exercise and demands truly remarkable performing skill, because the dizzying succession of variations brings to mind only the most rhythmically daring episodes of Yma Sumac. Mina seems to literally fly over the track, inhabiting the rhythm as though it were second nature to her. Her voice has changed considerably, already shedding its character-voice quality to become a "trained voice," shaped by practice and listening, as well as by a cigarette to "warm up the voice" (from the interview with Giulia Fasolini and Massimo Guerini, "La voce artistica 2011"). The lyrics mimic a children's nursery rhyme, while in fact standing as a manifesto celebrating "diversity." Pure surrealism, one that deserves to be revisited with fresh eyes rather than through the lens of a carefree revival that chops away most of the track to keep only its best-known melodic line.

Gino Paoli's "Il cielo in una stanza" pairs a simply sublime melody with a jazzy rhythmic backbone laid down by drums and piano. The strings lend emphasis to the whole. Crystalline as it is, the voice doesn't stray far from directly imitating Modugno, accenting every supporting vowel in a mannered style. As mentioned, the song would become a worldwide hit, staying on the Italian charts for 27 weeks. Read retrospectively, the lyrics are genuinely slight (the emphasis placed on the noun "immensità" and the adjective "infiniti" doesn't amount to poetry so much as a paraphrase of it), even though they reference an encounter Paoli had in a Genoa brothel (illegal, since such establishments were officially banned under the Merlin law of February '58), in a room with a "purple ceiling." The songwriter wasn't registered with Siae, the Italian copyright society of which he later became president, under investigation for tax evasion, and it was Mogol who tried to convince Mina to sing it, after several of her "rivals" had turned it down. What ultimately persuaded the future "Tigress of Cremona" were the record labels, and she certainly reaped the rewards. Among the three versions she recorded, the most direct and gripping, to this writer's ear, is the one from 1988. Renato Sellani on piano transforms the melody into an enchantment of phrasing and harmonization of sublime elegance, reaching its interpretive peak in the pyrotechnic final section. Mina, for her part, leans into the words as if to embrace them tenderly, almost unwilling to let them go. "Immense," indeed.

The sheer number of singles she recorded now becomes almost supernatural, matching the scale of her success. The themes all share a lightness that's since been lost — the lightness of someone still eager to face the future with wonder, courage and enthusiasm.

It's 1963 when the singer returns to Rai after having been pushed out due to her relationship with Pani, understandably frowned upon by the moral standards of the time. The song that establishes her as a brilliant yet thoughtful performer is the beat track "Città vuota," the Italian version of Gene McDaniels' "It's A Lonely Town." The opening vocal is strikingly dark in timbre, something not yet heard from Mina's voice up to that point. In the chorus, however, the voice soars into crystalline high notes in a strikingly effective ascending progression, even as the "fake English" pronunciation persists (here beginning to warp the vowels: "me" sounds like "mei") along with the marked Modugno-style phrasing. Her main counterpart in these years is chiefly Rita Pavone (notable is her "Cuore"), who shows the same cadences and the same taste for rhythmically powerful music. The supposed "rivalry" with Milva is frankly laughable, since Milva, from the very start, stood out for a dual repertoire: one crafted to please audiences (though far from predictable, as shown in the storytelling of "L'ultimo tram" and the orchestral arrangement of "Sbarre"), which cast her, a contralto, as the direct heir of Nilla Pizzi, and another built around a theatrical element, through explorations that would go well beyond mere singing, bringing her acclaim far from Italy, a country where openly declaring oneself a Communist was met with great scorn, if not by a narrow intelligentsia.

In 1964 a self-titled album is released. The reason is clear: here jazz takes centre stage, and Mina proves a pleasant interpreter, though only occasionally a truly luxurious one. "Stella by Starlight" is the exception that makes the difference. Backed by an orchestral arrangement that brings together the nobility of Duke Ellington and the rhythmic brio of Latin American music, this version draws directly on Frank Sinatra's, even though the song was already a recognized standard, performed by Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald. Mina delivers it with superb timbral lightness, elegance and absolute command of the intervals, carrying her from mid-range frequencies up to bright high notes rich in timbral and harmonic nuance.

1965 is the most intense year for those who love Mina's voice as a light soprano, and for the "purists" who regard this phase as the supposedly "higher" nobility of her timbre. The singer would later deny any interest in a "technical" style of singing, crediting this, with irony and wit, to the unnatural, hyper-baroque construction of Cecilia Bartoli's voice. And yet the Mina of these years is essentially a technical voice. The true interpreter Mina, as already noted, would come later. "Brava" is the most striking evidence of this. Written by maestro Bruno Canfora, the song is a pure exercise in style, albeit handled exemplarily, both in the orchestral writing and in the downright dizzying vocal performance. A whirlwind of string arpeggios opens the piece — an orchestration that draws direct inspiration from Walt Disney film scores. The voice begins its journey with repeated C4s, before launching into lightning-fast phrases like tongue-twisters, pausing here and there on trills, dips into low mezzo-soprano notes (admittedly, with thin overtones), onomatopoeia, openings of grand melodic lyricism, accompanied by displays of skill leaping from octave to octave, emulating instrumental sounds and feats of extremely long breath control. The dramatic ending, which from here on becomes something of a constant (every "extended voice" singer has been susceptible to it, from Yma Sumac to Tim Buckley, from Peter Hammill right up to Nina Hagen, Giuni Russo and Jeff Buckley. A different case altogether are Diamanda Galas, Meredith Monk, Bobby McFerrin, Mike Patton…), involves a sustained high C5. A delight for the ears and something far more than a simple "pop song." Canfora was probably not unfamiliar with Cathy Berberian's work, and his steering of Mina in that direction produces a terrific effect. From here, by induced and "accepted" admission, as part of her role, Mina becomes the most skilful set of pipes in Italy.

Yet one thing must be said: the vocal range is there, both now and in the future, and it's considerable, but not the miracle it's often made out to be. All pop/rock (and jazz, too) singers who, in pursuit of an "extended voice," push past the limits of registered singing, have produced sounds that are "ugly" if judged by the standards of "bel canto," or "characterful" if judged through a jazz, blues or rock lens. Tim Buckley's high notes were extraordinary, but quite nasal in full voice, worse still in falsetto, and his intonation often wavered ("Jungle Fire"), yet how many others have communicated such a universal sense of drama, precisely out of the need to broaden the palette with which to paint heaven and earth through the voice? Demetrio Stratos produced truly ugly falsetto tones by "bel canto" standards (in "L'abbattimento dello Zeppelin" he's certainly no Angelo Manzotti, or Philippe Jaroussky), something he rightly couldn't have cared less about, and his full high notes were often raw and hoarse, yet immensely powerful, centred, forceful. Giuni Russo, singing in full voice, was extremely nasal and had a typically popular, unrefined character ("Nell'orror di notte oscura," the ending of "Crisi metropolitana," "Lettera al Governatore della Libia"), yet switching into head voice she could be perfect, devoid of overtones in the less forceful registers (again the ending of "Crisi metropolitana," singing "mi ami o no?"), and still she had an arsenal of colours. Even Cathy Berberian herself, singing the Beatles' "Girl," sounded farcical, but knowingly so. Yma Sumac and Bobby McFerrin represent a case apart. The truth is that the term "extended voice" encompasses every kind of vocal emission, beautiful or ugly, functional (in Gisela Rohmert's sense) or not. By learning to produce "Tuvan subharmonics" and extreme "whistle register" frequencies, almost anyone can produce six or seven octaves of range with the odd physiological gap in between — not only a Nicola Sedda. Well, Mina, without knowing any of this, which emerged only gradually, was fully immersed in this very discussion, just as she would be in the future, in rare instances, but she would be.

This display of "skill" is echoed by a precious medley that brings together “Someone To Watch Over Me/ But Not For Me Lady Be Good/ The Man I Love/ I Got Rhythm”. Mina's voice particularly excels in her reading of "But Not For Me Lady Be Good" and "The Man I Love." In the first, the singer comes remarkably close to Sarah Vaughan's style of singing, while finding an even more pronounced lightness in the upper register. The same holds for "The Man I Love," where here and there a touch of melodrama lingers, along with, less welcome, a slightly overemphasized dramatic quality.

A different story applies to "E se domani." A jazz ballad wrapped in orchestral arrangements of crystalline purity, the song boasts a melody that's as magnificent as it is heartbreaking. The lyrics abandon the classic "certainties" of the songs tackled up to this point, to instead ponder the possible loss of a love — already a destabilizing notion for the era. Mogol proves a sublime lyricist here in conveying a sense of the fragility of affection, something Paolo Conte would later push to its extreme consequences with "Insieme a te non ci sto più," entrusted to the nasal (…oops, characterful) voice of Caterina Caselli. "E se domani" is a remarkably timeless song, sung with ever more intense emotional involvement as the years passed. Originally released in 1964 and later as the B-side of "Brava," it would be re-recorded in several versions, none of them negligible, but it's live that the song gained a truly beautiful interpretive dimension, especially in the portamenti leading into the liberating high note that marks its climax, powerful too, and which sets up a melancholy, mournful ending. One of the very few, and among the first, true Italian jazz standards. A wonder that stands entirely on its own.

Meanwhile, the output of 45s begins to slow down, since for some time LPs have been gaining real commercial traction. Italy is starting to look "out of step" in its musical offerings. In 1966 Bob Dylan releases "Blonde On Blonde," the Beatles release "Revolver," Frank Zappa releases "Freak Out!" The air everywhere has been electric for some time. In France, for almost a decade, the new singer-songwriter movement has already produced invaluable masterpieces, not only in musical terms but also in a lyrical attentiveness amounting to uncompromising social critique. Before long, much would change, and Mina would only partly become its spokesperson, tied as she is to a television landscape that is increasingly, if nobly, geared toward entertainment.

For her, 1966 is above all a song, and it's called "Se telefonando." The music is by Ennio Morricone, composer and conductor who, in 1964, had joined the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, a collective of classical composers founded by Franco Evangelisti in response to the persistent focus, in Italy and elsewhere, on "serial" music. Music that had turned dissonance, pushed to its extreme consequences through twelve-tone technique, into a cry against the ruins left by the last world war. Luigi Nono, among the greatest Italian twelve-tone composers and also an admirer of Mina, for whom he would have loved to write (a wish denied by his death, which took him from us in 1990), once said "after Hiroshima there can be no more poetry." Serialism was accused of gradually alienating people from classical music, which not so long before had been on everyone's lips through the most famous operatic arias. Not only that: in America, where jazz improvisation had already destabilized pure classicism, John Cage had long been exploring the paths of chance and indeterminacy, drawing closer to Eastern theories applied to compositional method. Cage himself, having joined the Fluxus movement, from which Nuova Consonanza had drawn vague elements, had taken part in the famous TV quiz show "Lascia o raddoppia," hosted by Mike Bongiorno, appearing as a mushroom expert. The composer regarded his participation in the show as a happening, that is, "an artistic occurrence in real time, confined to the moment in which it manifests itself." An "occurrence" that earned him, as a contestant, the not inconsiderable sum of 5 million lire (!).

Following his stint as a "contestant," Cage performed the piece "Water Walk," in which he used as instruments a bathtub, a watering can, five radios, a piano, ice cubes, a pressure cooker and a vase of flowers. The audience's reaction was one of bewilderment, disbelief bordering on ridicule, feelings fully endorsed by Bongiorno. The exchange between the composer and the TV host, reported in full on Wikipedia, stands as testimony to an arrogant Italian television culture that saw itself as the "centre of the world," entirely alien to avant-garde pursuits. When Bongiorno asks Cage whether he'll stay in Italy or go back to America, Cage answers, "My music stays," to which Bongiorno retorts, "Ah, so you leave and your music stays here, but it would have been better the other way round: your music should leave and you should stay here." Cage certainly achieved his goal, but his music "stayed" in Italy only within narrow academic circles and among the ranks of Gianni Sassi's Cramps label, before ending up, like and even more than the twentieth century's avant-gardes, as a bogeyman locked away in a sealed, carefully welded cauldron, so that nothing could ever emerge from it.

Morricone breathes this air of suspicion and, having joined Rai years earlier, distinguishes himself by writing melodies of an uncommon neo-romantic evocative power, powerful enough to become immortal in the collective memory, especially through the film scores he composed. At the same time, the composer also writes songs arranged with rigour, a highly personal touch, and vocal lines of timeless grace. The purest distillation of this can be heard in "Metti una sera a cena," "Ridevi," both from "Dedicato a Milva da Ennio Morricone" (though that would only arrive in 1972), and in "Se telefonando." The seemingly simple melody repeats in an ascending cycle of harmonic modulations that seems to have no end. The lyrics, written by Maurizio Costanzo and Ghigo De Chiara, recount, with a wealth of tangible detail and no desire for abstraction whatsoever, the working-through of grief over a love affair that has ended. Mina's voice performs the final miracle, transforming this ending of a romance into pure catharsis. A contemporary "ode to joy" with a decadent conscience.

But once again the spirit of jazz makes an appearance in this remarkable decade. On the album Mina 2, also from 1966, there's a track titled "My Melancholy Baby," written by Ernie Burnett and George A. Norton, brought to success in 1912 by William Frawley. It's plausible that Mina came across it through Judy Garland's version. In any case, the interpretation she gives the piece is thoroughly personal and full of interesting touches. Augusto Martelli (aka Bob Mitchell) is responsible for the sophisticated, highly refined arrangements. The singer's voice, preceded by a caressing string intro, soars immediately into high frequencies, stroked with superb lightness, before filling with overtones as it falls back into deliberately roughened low frequencies, with a typically "Fitzgerald-like" manner the moment the brass thunders in. While the strings retain an almost fairytale-like quality, the vocal unleashes a palette of colours that transfigures every word a thousand times over. It's a continuous rise and fall: lightness in the high register, leaning into the orchestral crescendos in the low register. There's even room for a trumpet solo, backed by repeated piano chords. Mina closes it all out with a unique elegance of timbre and phrasing. Pure enchantment.

In 1967, Fabrizio De André is a little-known singer-songwriter of the Genoese school. He has released several singles starting in 1963, and his first LP (effectively a wonderful compilation) came out in 1966. It contains a poignant ballad recounting a real-life news story. On 29 January 1963, La Gazzetta del Popolo reported the discovery, in the Olona river, of the body of a dancer/prostitute, registered as Maria Boccuzzi, fatally wounded by gunfire and left to drown while still dying. De André, who has always sung of men and women "on the margins," is struck by the story and decides to "reinvent her life and soften her death" for the young victim. The song reaches the ears of Mina, by then already a talent scout and her own agent, who decides to record it right at the moment when Faber is considering giving up music altogether. The song is called "La Canzone di Marinella." The version the singer recorded that year, I'm sorry to say, is really a kick in the teeth to De André's poetics. Mina has nothing to do with folk; she's still polishing an aestheticizing vocal character that doesn't suit in the slightest the disarming yet immensely profound simplicity of the song. The arrangement echoes this approach, turning the raw tale of genuine poetry into a kind of "little fairy tale." There's a great deal of cluelessness in this version. The singer clearly sensed Faber's worth, but doesn't prove equal to it. Nor does the audience. They receive this "contemporary fable" with no small amount of reluctance, and De André, having pocketed the Siae royalties, is able to carry on down his miraculous path.

Twenty years later, however, Mina is a different singer, while the Genoese singer-poet has risen to acclaim from both audiences and critics: a new recording is thus agreed upon as the sole unreleased track for the compilation "Mi innamoravo di tutto," released as part of De André's catalogue. Well, this version, with all due respect to anyone who disagrees, is the finest. Mina sings with Faber, and the two voices blend magnificently. Folk weds jazz in a heart-wrenching way. The acoustic arrangement is flawless, even though Massimiliano Pani does everything he can to taint it with cheap keyboards that, fortunately, end up fading into the background like wallpaper. Danilo Rea unspools one inspired idea after another over Massimo Moriconi's solid bass and Alfredo Golino's drums. Mina comes across as a dancer able to glide in and out of the rhythmic grid with a mastery no other Italian pop voice has ever managed, because here it's jazz pulsing through her before she even gives voice to the lyrics. Lyrics brimming with boundless melancholy that drag the words along as if in a melodrama under benzodiazepines. De André sings with vivid passion, anchoring his vocal to the rhythm section, as if guiding the melodic line with force and fury. The deep, bass-like texture that's naturally his, and his dramatic dryness, serve as the fulcrum around which Mina's voice is free to flow through all its noblest shades, from whisper to full-bodied harmonics never pushed into a shout, closing with a sublime harmonization in a breathed-out extreme high note (yes, Mina has produced hundreds of songs with breathed high notes, in spite of those who accuse her of only being able to "shout"). A masterpiece. An example of supreme class. The late singer-songwriter once told Vincenzo Mollica: "It really takes some nerve to sing 'La canzone di Marinella' with Mina, because her voice is a miracle. I think she was born with music in her DNA, as if she had some prenatal memory of music. This is a typical trait of genius: knowing before learning." I would counter by saying that it takes nerve to sing your songs, Fabrizio, so simple and so complex that shifting even one nuance risks falling into the ridiculous, and performing them your way does you an injustice, even though you never once called yourself a singer. Mina, whom you praised even in your first reading of her art, in the end managed to sing you well. I hope, for your sake, that there's no "other world" after death to make you double over with laughter listening to Franz Di Cioccio, who was nonetheless a friend to you.

1968 is the year the Mina/Canzonissima pairing reaches unexpected heights. Having dedicated an album of easy-listening songs in '66 to her bond with the show Studio Uno, during this year she delivers two gems of sheer vocal grace with no precedent in Italy, and which even abroad find no equivalent in terms of reinventing the African American musical idiom with an almost disarming naturalness. The songs are Joe Garland's "In The Mood" (though a classic of the Glenn Miller repertoire) and George Shearing/George David Weiss's "Lullaby Of Birdland." The arrangement of the first doesn't diverge much from Miller's recording. Mina first caresses the main theme's melody in a dry, understated way, free of any excess of character, before soon launching into a scat rich in timbral nuance, acting as the lead instrument. Her voice becomes a wind instrument. The theme, after the vocal variations, repeats a full three times, the singing progressively diminishing in power before flaring back up in a dizzying variation made of descending and then ascending scales, richly adorned with embellishments (trills and mordents), up to a thrilling final high D5. A performance to leave you speechless.

Likewise, "Lullaby Of Birdland" finds her handling a markedly syncopated rhythm over descending intervals, accompanied by finger snaps, her voice rich in timbral nuance and interpretive colour. Here, though, the arrangement is far more elaborate. A fine sax solo acts as a bridge, followed by a trumpet passage. Then the double bass ushers in the flute and electric guitar in a lavish display of beauty. Then it's Mina's voice that sketches out an assortment of ornamental vocalisations. The drums come in, the vocal imitations of the wind instruments return, chirping like birds, the drums drop back in and the voice climbs again, if with a few notes just slightly off, a sin far more venial than mortal. The pyrotechnic finale sees the singer start from a low C and climb through a scale of daring intervals all the way up to high C5. What can one say? It's a magical year.

We've already discussed "Cry", but a few more notes will only make its greatness dearer to us. Here Mina tackles the jazz idiom with even bolder nuances, from deliberate rasp to continuous rhythmic accents underlining the horns' movement. Her voice has an exquisitely refined vibrato, a clear emulation of trumpet-style swing, rising in a syncopated repetition of a third interval that tests her breath to the limit, up to crystalline high notes that embrace bluesy tones, carrying on with the same motion as a butterfly spinning in dance before taking flight and closing with a fortissimo on a sky-high F5. Sensational.

No fewer than three singles rightfully rank among her finest performances of the period: "Vorrei che fosse amore", "La voce del silenzio" and "Un colpo al cuore".

These are three beautiful melodies. The first, in particular — written by maestro Bruno Canfora and Antonio Amurri — is a true masterpiece. It repeats the miracle of "Se telefonando". The lyrics are extremely simple but never banal. The theme, introduced by a full orchestral passage, repeats twice, and the singer handles it like a jazz standard, using her voice, in her own way but with a richness of great character in the mid-range, as a wind instrument. It flares up and dims in power as it takes off into the high register and finds moments of reflection on the lowest notes, caressed with aching tenderness. It closes on a long, powerful mid-high note, merging with the full orchestra.

"La voce del silenzio" is a song written by Paolo Limiti together with Mogol and Elio Isola. Mogol's lyrics already contain reflections of great beauty — "e improvvisamente ti accorgi che il silenzio ha il volto delle cose che hai perduto" ["and suddenly you realise that silence has the face of the things you've lost"], it states in the moment leading into the song's customary high note in the chorus. The arrangement sounds a little heavy-handed today, especially in certain horn passages that, in their attempt at solemnity through a quotation from Bach's Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, end up closer to a "funeral band". Mina too loads her performance with excesses of character, though not enough to spoil an overall fine rendition. Particularly beautiful is the version found on Del mio meglio (volume one).

"Un colpo al cuore" by Bigazzi/Capuano is a track that starts out as a ballad and develops into a refined, modern arrangement (beat music resurfaces here), rich in colour and inventive touches. The alternation between rhythmic phrases and more lyrical moments allows Mina to unleash her entire vocal repertoire, from rhythmic accents to full-powered vocal display, even venturing into rasped tones without a hint of vulgarity. The performance here is lean, perfect, free of excessive mannerism, and — helped also by the fine lyrics — makes the song the most contemporary-sounding of the three.

In 1969 Paolo Limiti delivers to the singer "his" masterpiece "Bugiardo e incosciente", released as a single and on the CD that echoes its title. A masterpiece of lyric-writing, since the melody, of an elegance that wears out the adjective "heart-rending", is credited to Joan Manuel Serrat (the track is an adaptation of a song released in Spain two years earlier). Mina's vocal performance here abandons any strictly technical ambition to achieve purely dramatic results. One could in any case speak of "dramatic virtuosity", because the singer, as in rare past instances, attends to every nuance within each single word, giving it colour, rhythm, flare-ups, fade-outs, whispers, sighs, crescendos that never cloy. The orchestra is initially replaced by a simple acoustic guitar, later joined first by a percussion section, then by the inspired counterpoint of a viola's melody. As the song progresses, the arrangement grows too, before pulling back to leave space for the voice alone. Yes, because here Mina has finally become a mature performer. Probably the beauty of the lyrics, telling of a love that has ended but to which one cannot give the objective dimension of an "ending", in an almost masochistic way (far more than a premonition of "Minuetto", written by Franco Califano for the wonderful voice of Mia Martini), is lived as something personal, deep and intimate, and that is exactly how it comes across to anyone listening to this genuine marvel. This is a true classic that any performer worthy of the name must grapple with. The men, except for Carmelo Pagano, steer clear, given the nature of the lyrics; it will instead be sung by Ornella Vanoni, Rita Pavone, Jula de Palma, Anna Oxa. It pains me to make comparisons, but there's simply no contest. This song sounds as though it were written, sung and arranged today, and that, forty years on, is a mark of pure collective genius.

A curious note: the single's B-side, "Una mezza dozzina di rose", sees Mina credited as co-writer, something that had already happened on a couple of occasions in the past. That the singer was capable of writing to give voice to her own feelings is a little-known fact, regardless of the, admittedly modest, results.

From here on, Mina's story becomes the story of albums. We've already discussed this, but a few songs in particular deserve closer attention.

In 1970 Mina sings "Io e te da soli", written by Battisti/Mogol. The song has all the finest hallmarks of the duo's repertoire, the quintessential Italian singer-songwriter pairing (the lyrics have the classic facile populism of early Mogol: "Cosa stai dicendo/ io sto già morendo" ["What are you saying/ I'm already dying"]). The singer's voice approaches the song with a bluesy grain, singing it with highly effective touches of colour, but also with her usual interpretive "mannerism". The studio version deserves a mention of merit for Franco Mussida's guitar arrangement, a player far more than a mere session hand. The song will reach its definitive form on the aforementioned 1972 live album Dalla Bussola. Here the voice fully inhabits the song, never overplays its colours, distributes them with a sense of measure, and Mina's "black" soul comes through in the full power of its overtones, even in the extremely long closing vocalese phrase sustained over one tremendously long breath, after two spectacular Big Band breaks, launching the vocal line into "non devi dirlo mai" ["you must never say it"], which comes across as a genuine invocation. All the colours of the world expressed in a bold, expressionist painting. Everything feels more assured, lived-in, properly contextualised, free from the strings of Gian Piero Reverberi's arrangement and from the overly prominent backing vocals of the studio version.

This year, however, is unanimously regarded as the year of "Insieme", again written by Battisti/Mogol. The melody is heavenly and joyous, the arrangement minimal and full of strictly contemporary touches. Mogol's lyrics, as usual, are about as much as one can credit, in a thoroughly Italian fashion, to "a lady". Mina elevates it with a fine performance, though not lacking in heavily marked, tiresome affectation. A classic, built from the ground up to be one, and to top the charts.

Much worse are the lyrics of the other ballad, "Amor mio" (1971), from the same celebrated partnership, with rhyming couplets worthy of "schoolboy poets". Mogol, after all, always boasted of writing lyrics in a matter of minutes ("they're just little songs"), using metrical schemes straight out of the 1910s. When the demand for commitment — not necessarily political, but at least enough not to rehash the same old tune of decades past — will push him to write the lyrics for "La collina dei ciliegi", "Questo inferno rosa", "Abbracciala abbracciali abbracciati", "Gli uomini celesti", "Anima latina", much will have changed, and Mina will certainly never want to sing those pieces. The singer acknowledges the easy yet at the same time complex value of Lucio Battisti's creations (though she doesn't mention Mogol), describing them, in the letter published for the compilation "Paradiso", as melodies for "the delivery boys as they cycle off to deliver bread, the children, and all the mothers of Italy as they prepare lunch for their loved ones". This "ode to the easy song" — coming from a singer who, when she pushed herself to tackle the jazz discussed earlier, sought out songwriters whose writing was anything but easy, and who will soon make Piazzolla her own, as well as Sacred Hymns of every era — only confirms her profound inconsistency and fickleness, as well as her inability to assess her own path on her own, unless guided by skilled artistic directors, who will soon arrive.

In the meantime, though, it's a truly embarrassing run of singles that holds the fort ("Grande, grande, grande", "Parole parole", "La mente torna"). Little songs that have lost the apparent innocence of the previous decade's material and that seek a different dimension only in their sonic packaging, ending up redundant and good only for pleasing an already-won-over audience.

What salvages the "quality" of what the Mina phenomenon has to offer is a series of performances from 1972. With the Studio Uno era now behind her, the performer reigns absolute over "Canzonissima". It's here that Mina will delight her audience with a blazing performance of "Balada para mi muerte", written by and performed with Astor Piazzolla. No offence to Milva, who with her masterpiece album "Live at Bouffes du Nord" was certainly the foremost interpreter of the South American genius, but no one has sung that piece the way Mina did. The performer dives headlong into the song's drama and tackles it with a lean, fierce passion, especially in the more pensive opening lines. As the song grows and opens up harmonically, her voice swells to tear at the sky with its teeth, before landing back down, subdued. A splendid solo from the Maestro follows, on bandoneon. The opening vocal line returns, martial, and Mina digs into the words before taking off again, this time holding nothing back, up to a blazing finale, rendered triumphant by the orchestra. A standing ovation. Piazzolla never considered the Argentine tango a "dance", but rather a noble form of popular expression, voiced through arrangement variants that contemporary European classical music welcomes into its pantheon. Mina rightfully earns her place there alongside him. By now she is a "hungry", fierce performer, capable of delivering, in the heat of live performance, far more than within the cold walls of a recording studio. She is already "contemporary", in a sense quite removed from pop — or perhaps more contemporary than any academic, precisely because she is "pop too".

I've already said how great I believe the legacy of Dalla Bussola to be. Let me spend a few more words on "Fiume azzurro". Written by Luigi Albertelli and Enrico Riccardi, the song had already been performed on Studio Uno and released on a promotional 45, but it's in the sensational rendition on this live album that it will earn the stature of an interpretive classic. The song has the same rhythmic drive, rich with intense harmonic modulations, typical of Battisti's writing. The verse is genuinely complex, exploding into a chorus where the drums drive a fragmented groove not unlike what Giles did on the airier tracks of "In The Court Of The Crimson King". The song, though, has a black soul. Mina enchants in the full-throated passages, in the near-spoken ones, in moments of lightness as much as in a truly thunderous rasp. She launches into the finale with a jazzy vocalise that, in the heat of the moment, hits a bum note, instantly absorbed by the voice as the necessary birth pang of a soul on fire, as she tells us that what she wanted "isn't enough for her anymore" (technically this is known as "error repair", and it's emotionally an even harder feat than mannered perfection). Astonishing. Mina is a vocal machine that grinds everything in its path, overwhelming even herself. No Italian voice will ever possess such a marked and deeply rooted command of African-American musical language. Not Rita Pavone, who in her maturity (reached at 68) will give us the admirable if minor "Masters" (2013); not Farida, remembered almost exclusively for the haughty "Rodolfo Valentino" by Battiato/Pio; not the "almost clinical" technicality of Giorgia; not the working-class vulgarity of Iva Zanicchi or the drawn-out mannerisms of Ornella Vanoni. Only Mia Martini will come close, on the albums "Danza" and "Miei compagni di viaggio", but with a tonal range (and I don't mean only range, but nuance) and a phrasing that are just slightly narrower. As for Mina's dramatic intensity, that will be a story all its own, deserving of the highest praise — the kind that merits a separate, equally careful examination.

In 1974, the singer recorded an album, Baby Gate, dedicated to her father and to the music of her teenage years, jazz and then more… jazz. Among the handful of songs is a magnificent “Amorevole”, credited to Vittorio Buffoli, Vito Pallavicini and Pino Massara, but made famous thanks to Nicola Arigliano. Arigliano was, above all else, an Italian outsider. In love with African-American idiom, which he delighted in marrying to Bach-like counterpoint (something very dear to the great Nina Simone), he had sown few hits, but ones of genuine depth. Mina met him at Rai and decided to record “Amorevole” as early as 1959, but it's in '74 that the song truly takes flight. The mournful pace of this version, as if created with the lights off and recorded live, caresses face and soul just as the lyrics suggest. Mina's voice sounds like it could be from today. She lingers over every word, stripping it bare, living out genuine anguish as much as pure eroticism. When she sings the second chorus, you can feel the stature of a truly great interpreter. The vocal sound lightens, resounding, to follow the melody, then falls back on itself, smudged with smoke, letting go of a “senza te” as if that really were the end of everything. Just a slight strain on the final “abbandonati” is mildly irritating, but it's a venial sin for a performance born of the best Sarah Vaughan, yet with a “voracity” in its vocal language that insists on seeking out the most intimate meaning of sound and verse, to a degree with no real precedent. Renato Sellani on piano traces geometries of great lyrical sweep. The pauses carry more weight than the notes played, and this is pure aristocracy in music. A true gem to be celebrated, even if it could hardly hope for applause from the sales charts.

Here is Italy at its noblest, speaking a language of international stature. This single track alone would be enough to show that there was never just one Mina of comic poses and vocal excess, but many, many Minas, to be sought out in the most hidden, least celebrated corners of her records. Not like those albums that tried to present her to us through singles, always identical to herself — an utterly mistaken approach for anyone who wants to understand the “mystery” of such vocal grace. A voice certainly shaped by convention too (lyrical temptations included), but one that moved away from it early on, in spite of what she has always claimed with a kind of pure, necessary self-sabotage — because to relaunch yourself it's important to also “cut yourself down to size”, even by denying what you've done, for better or worse.

It's 1975. Finally, it's time for a top-tier artistic direction, entrusted to Gabriel Yared. Trained at the Ecole Normale du Musique in Paris, by the mid-70s the composer doesn't yet have what we might call a “fully launched” résumé, but he does have genuinely new ideas. Having exhausted his “academic” interest in classical music, he moved toward contemporary atonal composition and even tried his hand at the singer-songwriter tradition. By the time he arrives in Italy at Mina's court to write the arrangements for Minacantalucio, it's clear that his weight on the record goes well beyond a simple “reworking” of Battisti's catalogue. Yared asks Mina to sing in a way that's “alive, present, but free of excessive ornamentation”. The result is, up to this point, unprecedented… for Mina. Mia Martini had, with “Padre davvero”, approached a dramatic yet dry and raw way of singing. It was no longer possible to be deaf to what was coming from within Italy itself.

This album, much discussed already, has many strokes of genius, but I want to dwell on two: “Non è Francesca” and “I giardini di marzo”. The record was cut in the deconsecrated church of Sant'Eufemia in Milan, and the echoes of a space far richer in resonance than a simple studio can definitely be heard. “Non è Francesca” opens with a spinet playing somewhere between classical baroque and new classical music. Mina begins to caress the lyrics lightly, as if “searching for something that isn't there”. The string orchestra acts as a majestic counterpart, introducing a story that gradually grows darker, the moment the harmonies literally start to dissolve into atonal writing, setting up an ending announced by the singer's resounding delivery of “lei vive per me”. As if representing the jumble of thoughts following a loss, the orchestra launches into a finale, also atonal, sustained by brass interjections that feel like ominous warnings, continuing in pure delirium until it ends abruptly, as if “snipped off”. Truly striking. No one in Italy has dared so much, and with such awareness, within “symphonic pop” (here, really, avant-garde) — not even the many celebrated fathers of homegrown progressive pop/rock. Nothing here sounds cloying; the story is linear and drawn in dark tones. The attempt to bind popular song to “classical” forms, in Italy as abroad, has very rarely come close to strictly contemporary composition. Some bands have achieved noble results, but most have fallen into postmodernist excess, showing a “compartmentalized” alternation of rock or pop impulses with bombastic classical textures (“L'isola di niente” by Premiata Forneria Marconi). Battisti's writing on this track is that of a pure medieval minstrel, and as such it has a clear “ancient” lineage. Yared's work does nothing but highlight this writing, altering its harmonic fabric the way certain madrigals by Gesualdo da Venosa did — a composer long forgotten and, as it happens, rediscovered right around the mid-twentieth century. Writing that is ancient and yet akin to contemporary harmonization. The Mina-voice here is simply an instrument among others, yet one capable of sketching the story in an authentic, spiritual way. All of this makes the song resistant to any kind of categorization, placing it in a “borderline” territory (it brings to mind John Cale's work on “The Marble Index” and Desertshore” by Nico) that was never sufficiently explored at the time, and still isn't today, except in the furrows ploughed by the most inspired Scott Walker. A risk perfectly carried off, and absolutely admirable.

Reverent but never obsequious, the arrangement for “I giardini di marzo” is built to showcase a voice that here truly touches the sky. Any performer unfamiliar with the concept of “vocal resonance channels” should consider this performance a mandatory step in their own journey. More than a song, it feels like listening to a sacred aria, and Mina takes on the voice of every woman in the world to throw open the doors of that “immensity” constantly repeated throughout the lyrics. In the beautiful everyday scenes evoked by the lyrics — “il carretto”, “i soldi già finiti”, the memory of a mother, “i ragazzi che vendono i libri all'uscita di scuola” — scenes that meet the equally raw reality of someone who “alla sera al telefono chiede perché non parli”, Mina sings with an almost stifled voice, sick with a kind of living that gives less than it demands. Just a sighed vocalise, and the voice nails itself on a “Che anno è?” that contains every overtone of every possible voice. The orchestra stops accordingly, as if bowing, then continues with the singer leaning on the vowels to reveal them in all their power — graceful, never forced — and all their colours. “Infiniti”, indeed. A shiver, pure and simple. Later in the chorus, Mina marks the words “vivere”, “immensi”, “dolcissime” as if cutting them with a blade, letting her voice drop away on “non tremano più”, “amor per te”, “malinconie”. The sad awareness of the “courage to live” that “ancora non c'è” is rendered as if in a barely whispered confession. In the second verse the voice gains more determination, though still pained on “dicesti: tu muori”, before being left alone again in the anguish of “continuai a camminare lasciandoti attore di ieri”, and then… the miracle repeats itself in the chorus, where “ho nell'anima” becomes broken, hoarse. I confess, I have rarely heard anything so moving.

Barely two years on, with just two singles thrown to the public for “consumption”, it's already time for new gambles. 1977 is the year of the gem par excellence, Mina Almost Jannacci, but also of a stunning track, “Ormai”, taken from Mina con bignè, which together with the aforementioned album of songs by the Milanese singer-songwriter would form a double album, though also sold separately.

The song is credited to Andrea Lo Vecchio, better known as the author of the famous “Luci a San Siro” by Roberto Vecchioni. It's a contemporary romance, dressed in symphonic garb that forgoes the classic verse-chorus song structure in favour of a single theme which, sparingly, opens up and explodes into a crescendo of rare lyrical sensitivity. On “Ormai”, Mina doesn't just sing the words, she “creates” them, giving each syllable an endless sense of anguish charged with eroticism, calling to herself not only the soul but also the body of the lost lover. An anguish that drags the words along until it takes them apart, filling them with meaning even where the lyrics themselves are objectively slight. When Mina sings “non vivo più ormai”, the gates swing open onto an Eden embracing the whole of Italian romantic song (and beyond) at its noblest. It is the creation of a new form of musical drama, of which the performer, at the peak of her artistic maturity, becomes its unsurpassed — and perhaps unsurpassable — voice.

Much has already been said about Mina Almost Jannacci, but regarding two songs I'd like to spend a few more words. They are “Vita vita” and “Rino”. While it's easy to comment on a piece like “E sa vè”, where the sardonic, “liberated” storytelling shines through (because we are all defenceless and truthful in the face of death) of someone watching life slip away through the waltzing eyes of those gathered at a bedside, the two songs mentioned have, perhaps, something extra. “Rino” already has, in its title alone — referring to the diminutive of a name — something that sounds strange and ungainly. The violent confession in the lyrics is no less so. It opens with “non sono ubriaca”, a pause, “questa sera”, and it's already a story unto itself. If the piano arrangement, suspended between new classical music and jazz, is thoroughly noble, Mina's voice here is a monument. Dry, grieving yet cynical, theatrical but without any excess of character, it carries the weight of a letter written by a mother to her son. An exhortation to “be loved by everyone as much as she, the mother, was never loved”, and at the same time the final farewell of the son the mother remembers through this letter. Mina embodies both voices in a single vocal line, reaching her peak between 1'15” and 1'30”, singing “mamma ti saluto” in the son's voice and pronouncing his name (Rino) in an explosion of harrowing pathos, with a sudden burst of strings after a vocal line that, in remembrance, shows the sheer force of life in the face of the sudden, unexpected arrival of an end so often named yet known by no one except through the fear of it. I don't believe any heartstring or instrument string has ever delivered such realist violence. Here, Mina is synonymous with absolute genius.

“Vita vita” opens with a soundscape and then a folk-music waltz over a limping whistle. Here too the strings introduce the vocal, this time straight into the upper register. A pained, languid vocal line that allows itself natural anticipations over the rhythm, before a minimal but essential harmonic shift announces the return of the instrumental section and the earlier whistling. Very few elements, but measured to perfection.

Much has been said about the final chapter at the Bussola, but there's one thing I want to talk about: the musical encounter with Ivano Fossati, one that would have a sequel many years later. The Genoese singer-songwriter had already played an important role in shaping the Bertè sisters' paths — for Mia Martini, in particular, he had conceived that great jewel of Italian pop music that was, and remains, “Danza”, to be released shortly after. While Mia enters Fossati's music with unreleased songs and in a performing style entirely her own, Mina takes a different approach. In the two tracks featured on Live '78, “Stasera io qui” (in the studio) and “Non può morire un'idea” — a rarer-than-rare occurrence in the singer's discography — Mina, through elective affinity, closely mirrors Fossati himself. From him she borrows the rasp, the vocal portamenti, the mannerisms, consequently amplifying both his virtues and, to excess, his flaws, including a certain nasal quality. The result is broadly black-inflected, focused, heavily charged (here and there too much so) but rich in deep emotion. When, on “Stasera io qui”, the variation appears with its opening, you can feel the wonder of it. Throughout these tracks there's a suffocating expressionism, a bold, vividly coloured picture that remains memorable, above and beyond any other consideration.

1979 marks her return to the studio with a full-length album. From Attila, as I mentioned earlier, the track I want to highlight is “Shadow Of My Old Road”. In an era when the return to black music is now an established fact, it's a pleasure to listen back to this track, bolstered by production worthy of late-70s Motown. Here Mina plays the part of a carefree, amused and pitch-perfect interpreter/songbird of the best disco-funk, with clear echoes of Barry White's recordings. The track is underpinned by a rock-solid rhythm section (the electric bass, also using the slap technique, is superb) and outstanding horn parts. The synth is clearly a child of an analogue-tinted era, but it lends itself well both to the arpeggios and to the hinted-at melodic lines. The voice provides a counterpoint with mid-range frequencies and crystalline highs, but also with the now familiar rasping notes. A flimsy lyric is used as a pretext for timbral exploration and extremely fluid phrasing, the kind that hadn't been heard from her in years and that, in this particular key, would no longer be her trademark. One of those tracks that, if heard by Kamasi Washington, would hardly go unnoticed.

There are three songs from 1980 I want to spend a bit more time on: “Voglio stare bene”, “Capisco” and “She's Leaving Home”. As already mentioned, Kyrie is an uneven album, but one containing some of the most brilliant and adventurous ideas in the Cremona-born singer's career. In the years to come, this willingness to explore somewhat risky paths — shown here, moreover, with considerable nonchalance — would become increasingly rare. We've already discussed the elegant, airy “Musica”, with its clear progressive-rock lineage, but “Voglio stare bene” certainly goes further. Obviously the genre's golden age has long since passed, but this mini-suite is handled with a great gift for concision and hints of post-punk. The fairy-tale-like introduction, with baroque keyboards and flute, directly calls to mind Premiata Forneria Marconi, who not long before had arranged, with huge success, Fabrizio De André's first live album. Needless to say, what makes the difference here is the singer. The haughty prologue finds Mina working with a vocal approach that certainly takes into account what Matia Bazar had recorded with Antonella Ruggiero, but also what Opus Avantra had done with Donella Del Monaco. A lyrical approach supporting lightly-textured top notes (admittedly a touch tight and faintly shrill, because here the voice is reaching for the “operatic”, albeit with evident irony). The vocal line is literally “hung in the sky” as she sings “Voglio la fine delle necessità, sguazzare nell'abbondanza, voglio i bastardi tutti quanti di là per chiuderli tutti…”, then plunges from head voice down to much lower resonators on the following “insieme”. Shivers. First rhythmic shift (the lyrics read “liberata dal domani, liberata dal sé e dopo, liberata dalla sete, liberata dal contagio”) and a grand opening onto low notes, as in the unfolding of a string-driven tale where the voice becomes violin, viola and cello with absolute naturalness. What follows is a classic keyboard progression approaching a lush fugue, bringing to mind “Photos Of Ghosts” and “Storia di un minuto”. The voice echoes the analogue sounds in a bold up-and-down movement, the lyrics fragmented across assorted overdubs, singing “Voglio stare bene” with a surge that has nothing to do with prog but that already speaks the language of the nascent Italian post-punk scene. Everything finally explodes in a raspy, liberating “respirare” that launches a guitar solo. The drum rush lands, and the voices, now turned into a choir, return to the austere solemnity of the opening, this time with an operatic vocalise. The curious thing is that the author of this pastiche, Simonluca, condenses it all into just over three minutes of pure energetic charge, exuberant and imaginative. I'll be honest: had this song had a different performer, it wouldn't have been remotely the same deliciously classy exercise. One to listen to again, reassess, and praise as it deserves.

Equally “curious” is Massimiliano Pani's debut as a songwriter with “Capisco”. Here the singer opens with an extremely convincing spoken-word-style intoning (which later in the song becomes a touch cloying), following a lively intro of electronic drum pad supported by syncopated accents typical of a rock band, then shifting into a funky groove. The curious thing is that… as Mina sings “Capisco un fagiano baciarmi la bocca, capisco un vitello perder la madre, capisco un gabbiano leccare vernice, capisco un orologio ammazzare la vita”, she sounds like Lindo Ferretti. Disco-music touches return to colour the entrance of the chorus, where the vocal becomes aggressive and direct, rhythmic, building through a progression of repeated notes, before giving way to a beautiful acoustic rhythm-guitar break, a vigorous bass (Paolo Donnarumma), and a subsequent electric guitar solo with an exquisitely refined tone, doubled in phrasing by a light, super-high voice that sounds like birdsong.

Giuni Russo's “Energie” would be released the following year, but in these grooves, and in the even more inspired ones of “Kyrie”, there is already a hint of that path to come.

“She's Leaving Home” is, by itself, a celestial creation, and here the rearrangement of the string section is thoroughly fitting and well judged, even though, as we know, Beatles fans won't accept a single comma of the Fab Four's output being touched. Mina isn't bothered by that, and delivers here her finest interpretation of their catalogue. The singer's voice, doubling itself in the chorus, reaches peaks of an immaculate purity, comparable only to the very earliest Barbra Streisand. It makes your throat ache just imagining how those extremely delicate, sighed notes were produced, careful not to disturb, gently caressing the sonic and lyrical narrative. The orchestra, for its part, reaches perfection in an arrangement by Mario Robbiani (who even received a congratulatory telegram signed Lennon/McCartney for it), its harmonies purely chamber-like, yet coloured by jazz substitutions entrusted to the piano. The close meets mysterious vocal echoes on the high “bye bye”s, a mystery heightened by the final chords on Victor Bach's ivory keys. It has to be said: a masterpiece of international stature.

I'll mention only one other chapter from the Eighties, which comes after the lovely reinterpretation of "Nature Boy" by Eden Ahbez.

A new chapter, and in my opinion the best one, in the collaboration with the duo Riccardo Cocciante and Giorgio Calabrese. The song, from 1986, is titled "Secondo me," and once again Renato Sellani is on piano. Much has been said about its heartache, and it will never be said enough, tucked within a "secondo me si sta arrendendo qui l'eroica fedeltà" and in what presents itself as one of the most compelling harmonic progressions in the whole repertoire. A melody that keeps hinting at an eruption that finally reveals itself, textbook-perfect, on a high note — only to collapse in on itself and return to the initial exposition. A circular structure. Nothing to do with a traditional song form, everything to be ascribed to the swarm of great intuitions of a cultured French-style recital, caught in the act of bringing Jacques Brel before the court of the grand Italian operatic tradition.

Just when everything seemed to be coasting along with no need whatsoever for a variation on the theme worthy of praise, the Nineties arrive bearing a generous handful of gems.

If the grim domestic tale told as a tango in "Il corvo" (1991) had seemed largely successful, especially in its opening passages, 1996 would be the year of a return to top form. "Volami nel cuore," from Cremona, is a classic of Italian song. Alberto Testa/Manrico Mologni and Gualtiero Malgoni sign off on a true masterpiece of homegrown "adult music." A perfect melody, carried along by arrangements that are, all things considered, retro, since they're the offspring of an Eighties sound long left behind by then. Despite this, the voice here is so "much," so perfectly at ease in the ascending vertigo the song gradually builds toward, that it achieves on its own what the production only partly manages. This "ruggine di vento" can be a caress rich with an emotional depth that few can match.

It will, however, be the first concept album in many years to bring quality back to an overall level of real distinction.

We've already covered it, and I'll go into detail again: Naples Vol. 1 (described by Massimiliano Pani himself, in an interview with Il Mattino, as a "refined and courageous" record) is a gem, and two tracks in particular make all the difference, "Core 'Ngrato" and "Maruzzella."

In the first, a chamber orchestra returns as co-star alongside the voice. It is certainly a respectful version, rendered almost as if to certify the standing of the Neapolitan song as a chapter within the whole of the Italian operatic tradition. It succeeds effortlessly, with results a thousand times more convincing than anything achieved up to that point by the Three Tenors, just a few months before the release of their concert film recorded at Wembley Stadium and then in the US, at Giants Stadium in New York, in their most memorable recital. The solemnity of the orchestral overture is something magnificent, and the conducting manages to be lean in its execution yet laden with emotion. The voice stops the air, curling the soul into a contrite fist, over the faintest breathy whispers of "core, core 'ngrato" at the 1'22" mark, and that fragment alone would be enough to explain why this voice is a world monument. It's as if, in that small crevice of music, the voice of Mina — recorded live, as on the whole album — in casting her mind back to a lost youth, somehow, through some absurd short-circuit, actually became young again. "E nun ce pienze cchiù" turns into a release entrusted to the singing, with the orchestra swelling in a sudden crescendo yet still held back, as if to mark out the one, noble protagonist: Mina.

"Maruzzella" is no less remarkable, even though every purist of the Neapolitan tongue has had something indignant to say about it. But this, too, is Mina: a woman capable of daring, and with stubborn determination she pulls it off here, though not elsewhere ("Sulla tua bocca lo dirò," where the attempt to approach the operatic altar through classical means of arrangement and a reinforced pop voice simply doesn't work). On this track the orchestral intro with the voice turned muezzin is superb; in anyone else's hands it would have come off as contrived, pretentious, ugly. Here instead it towers, as if to say "I can do anything" (or almost, I'd add). The sudden entrance of a jazz combo, in an abrupt shift of scene and emotional register, has a cinematic quality and comes off entirely successful even in terms of production, in the balancing of levels. Even while reviving something old (or perhaps precisely because of that), the track sounds ultra-modern, in the sense of "contemporary" tout-court, something to feed to the most obsessive musicologists investigating music as "inquiry and event." The way it conceives the passage from the evocative rarefaction of another world into an intimate and seemingly hazy, listless narrative that follows is almost inhuman. A cynical night-club scene that, after the second minute, runs into a curious vocal sample and the orchestra's return, rounding off the circle of the interpretation. But it's still not over: on the lines "cchiù forte 'e ll'onne quanno 'o cielo è scuro," the voice finds yet another character, almost an echo underscoring the jolt of the heart that, as the lyrics say, "sbatte." In the finale the singing turns stentorian, bending the limits of pitch with a wholly new expressive approach. A supremely luxurious performance, among the most sophisticated ever produced.

A few years later (in 2004), Giuni Russo would release "Naples che canta," and that's another story altogether — more scattershot, yet deserving of real attention, even though achieved with far more modest means.

It's 1997, the year of the magnificent duet with De André on "Mi innamoravo di tutto," when Mina goes into the studio to sing "Tre volte dentro me (Dentro Marilyn)" by Afterhours. The voice sings the verses double-tracked across alto and soprano registers, before exploding into the chorus. The abrasive songwriting of Manuel Agnelli here finds a terrifying interpreter in the delivery of the rock scream. Watching her on stage, I would have pictured this woman every bit as credible as Layne Staley. The electric guitar solo in the track is pure vertigo, as is the second chorus, when the raw, full-voiced singing is joined by echoes of anguished "respira!" cries. Truly unforgettable. One wonders whether, in retrospectives on the grunge phenomenon, this track will ever find more room than it did when Nada covered it many years later. No, unfortunately not. Mina is useful even — and especially — to young songwriters, but by now she's become such a "big" institution that she ends up seeming "old," even when she's anything but.

A "light" flow of frequencies drifting skyward like little squeaks opens the remake of "Suona ancora" by Casino Royale. A track that is, in truth, fairly unremarkable on its own, but here the production makes all the difference, and that production owes its merit to the incredible talent of Voci Atroci. Across the track's 7 very nimble minutes, Mina's voice — often echoing the by-now-consecrated Giorgia, with whom she'd duet in 2007 — settles into a well-established jazz mood that turns acid in the section closing out the track's first part (4'10"), repeating "suona ancora." Still enormously entertaining today. A game that's anything but predictable, one that "conjures out of nothing a song that doesn't really exist on its own," from someone who sees risk as a destination, not an abyss.

The curious thing is that the album comes out at the same time (October 2007) as Antonella Ruggiero's memorable "Registrazioni moderne," on which the Genoese singer reworks her own repertoire to winning effect, joined by, among others, Subsonica, Bluvertigo, Scisma, Ritmo Tribale, Banda Osiris, Timoria. The result is that the singer from Cremona's own step is almost completely overshadowed. Strange, but true. Twenty-odd years on, though, both tracks mentioned deserve real attention.

A few years have to pass before another "concept" chapter returns. The year of the Great Jubilee (2000), which opened with the unsealing of the Holy Door during the Christmas Eve ceremony, performed by an ailing John Paul II. The musical and artistic initiatives that followed throughout that year — heralded by seers as the year of the "end of the known world" and of a "Millennium Bug" (or Y2K Bug), which did in fact occur, though thankfully with far less catastrophic results than predicted — would prove far more "disastrously hyped" than anything that actually happened. Very little of it would hold up (the genuinely praiseworthy "Musica Coeli," with Tosca, Vincenzo Zitello, Federico Sanesi, Franco Parravicini, Stefano Melone, Mario Arcari, Riccardo Tesi, being an exception). Mina's Dalla Terra would be among the survivors.

In 1999, in the Basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore in Milan, Giuni Russo performed a sensational piece co-written with Maria Antonietta Sisini, set to a text that is, in truth, not especially well known ("Nada te Turbe") by the Carmelite mystic Teresa d'Avila, beatified in 1970. The track would reach its interpretive peak in a magnificent performance released on the 2002 live album "Signorina Romeo." Even today there are few compositions based on this text (the earliest known one is by Taizé, from 1986), and in 2000 Mina released one penned by Monsignor Frisina. Comparing the two tracks reveals a huge gap in Frisina's disfavor relative to Russo's version, and it sparked a controversy stirred up by the light soprano, who passed away 15 years ago. Russo, in an interview with Rockol, none too subtly accused Mina of plagiarism, branding her as "incapable of religious feeling"; not only that, but with her trademark temperament she even went so far as to challenge her to a media duel, a head-to-head comparison of the two compositions. Now, that Russo had devoted herself entirely to an ascetic repertoire for some years, well before her illness appeared, is common knowledge; as to whether her claims held any merit, there's no way to know, since there is no connection whatsoever between the two compositions, apart from the shared text.

One thing is certain: Dalla Terra is not a wholly successful album, but it does contain exemplary moments that are anything but detached from genuine emotional investment. How much that emotional investment stems from religious faith or not matters little to the history of music in general, because the intimacy that emerges from certain grooves on this record is, once again, worth an entire career.

I'll talk about "Pianto della Madonna" and "Voi ch'amate lo criatore." While the canon-form treatment of "Quando corpus morietur," with Gianni Ferrio's string arrangement, is interesting despite a voice lacking the appropriate timbral lightness, it is in the first two tracks mentioned that the formal and spiritual bond reaches absolute fulfillment. The first is based on Monteverdi's original score, but the pared-down reinterpretation, thanks to an inspired Danilo Rea, reaches a climax entirely untethered from time and space. The voice is the absolute protagonist, rich with an indescribable range of nuances, from the flute-like whisper that cradles — and thus takes "in the gut" — the anguish of the first "Iam moriar," to the explosion into a long, liberated high note, equal to an entire Golgotha. It's a kind of bond sought and achieved between heaven and earth, between the material perception of pain that becomes cinematic and neo-realist as much as transcendent through grace, by means of piano and a voice that is "mother among all voices." Now more than ever, there's a need to reach for the word "contemporary," in the sense of "art music" at work here, thanks to a reinterpretation that borders on the miraculous.

"Voi ch'amate lo Criatore" (from the "Laudario di Cortona," 13th century) finds the secret of a confession and, as such, dissolves, lingering on "la speme mia e dolce acquisto," lighting up with illuminated participation only to immediately fold back on "fue crocifisso per li peccatori." There's a breath running through the whole song, a stentorian breath, which upon meeting the verse "stare enchinato," referring to the bowed head of the dead Christ, becomes torn, as if there weren't enough air left to release sound. The entire litany of details about the son being sung here guards a secret all its own in terms of vocal delivery, without resorting to any virtuosity, not even hinted at. It's a theatrical emphasis from someone who has made Stanislavski her master, whether consciously or not we cannot know. A dignified austerity, of someone who needs to draw everyone's attention to herself, returns in the singing of the verse "voi ch'amate lo Criatore," closing the invocation, the listening. Rea is again at the piano, and the same conviction holds: if Mina had done a concept recital for piano and voice alone, the way Milva did — however tiresome such comparisons might be — she would have handed down to history one of the all-time definitive records. There's still time and vocal material to consider it. This, meanwhile, is pure genius.

We've already written about the return to the stage, albeit through a video document, with the song "Oggi sono io" (2001) by Alex Britti, and about the unbridled assertiveness of character with which the singer reconfirms herself, here too, as an outstanding African-American-style interpreter.

In 2002, in one of the more understated episodes of the album Veleno, the singer tackles "Mente," a song by Gianni Ferrio and Samuele Cerri, which incorporates Chopin's Prelude No. 4, with Antonio Faraò at the helm. It's one of those things released almost as an afterthought, nothing more, nothing less. Hearing Mina's voice, even broken up to soar on crystalline frequencies and over Chopin, is something of indescribable nobility. The parallel with Battiato's "Luna indiana," in Alice's rendition, comes easily, but here there's a different feeling, far less austere. The entrance of a string orchestra (and then Federico Cicoria's sublime oboe) to carry the narrative forward becomes a further mark of beauty. Mina is present in the song with a disarming detachment, as if the infidelity being recounted were the most consolidated of habits. It's like truly singing the pages of a phone book, yellowed by the monotony of a time that never changes. And that's exactly how Mina interprets this song, succeeding as no one else could have. Her channeling of sound, extremely centered and with total opening of the upper resonance channels, is such as to guarantee a pitch without the slightest, faintest flaw. The absence of infused drama makes the song dramatic by paradox, something that, even in the cadences of the melody, evokes a man, Robert Wyatt, with all the "heretical thinking" that might come with it.

With elegant but not always sharply focused results in terms of the bond between interpretation and songwriting, there are Daniele Silvestri, Zucchero, Ivano Fossati, Renato Zero, Bruno Lauzi, Giancarlo Bigazzi, among others. Silvestri's "La seconda da sinistra," for example, is a really fine song, but the vocal intention doesn't quite do it justice; here it really seems as though Mina just happened to pass through a recording studio, and not even the very fine classical guitar arrangement is enough to carve out something more than "interesting." By contrast, "Succhiando l'uva," credited to Zucchero/Saggese/Vergnaghi, although it sounds like an unreleased track by a Fornaciari cover band, is a pleasantly light song, weighed down by a few excesses of vocal character. Still, one thing must be acknowledged… what self-irony!

In 2005 a themed album returns, and the result is remarkable once again, even though critics proved rather unwelcoming. We're talking about L'Allieva, about "The Nearness of You," "Good-bye," "April in Paris," which will be discussed in detail.

In the breathy delivery of "The Nearness Of You," light as the softest and most sensual of feathers, capable of frequency oscillations equal to those of a struck tuning fork, Mina finds the most immaculate beauty of her singing. An angelic sound, which in the finale delivers a crescendo of pure chills. A classic, for a voice that is "the classic" itself.

In "Good-bye," the vocal opens smoky and exposed, anticipating the very slow swing of the jazz band (Massimo Moriconi on double bass is truly extraordinary). It's a display of elegance in "vocal touch," the kind that could make anyone do impossible things, yet without any perceived technical showing-off. It's a play of nuances, like a negative examined under a magnifying glass down to the barest of flayings. The voice one perceives is that of a young girl, but one who has left everything behind, to rediscover her own loves, herself above all.

An orchestra opens "April In Paris." At the helm, once again Gianni Ferrio, extraordinary as ever. The voice opens listless and reluctant, seeming to approach even the high notes half-heartedly, at times perfectly centered and crystalline when delivered lightly, torn when delivered with power, as if wanting to immediately drop to lower frequencies. The low notes are emphasized, as though wanting to be welcomed by a larynx turned giant. Within these grooves, Mina is a curling of the soul, a way of speaking with a depth drawn from a domestic tale, habitual yet always different. Never ordinary, in fact constantly searching for perfection of language, as if everything said and done were never enough, regardless. Within this interpretive approach, private (in the sense of intimate) and reduced to extremes, lies that trip to America she never took, where, by her own account, "she would have been just one among many." It's a shame to have to admit that no, it wouldn't have been like that at all. We know, however, that "it would have been" means nothing; everyone is what they are and could not have been otherwise, for better or worse, and if there's so much to say about Mina, all the better, since it's never enough.

The interpretive miracle repeats itself in 2010, the year of the album Caramella. The opening track, "You Get Me," is a black ballad equal to a nursery rhyme. Extremely sweet, as if it had come straight out of the (lesser) repertoire of Paul McCartney, the melody, written by Teitur Lassen, welcomes the nobility of a duet with Seal. A refined adult pop track, arranged to perfection.

The record features songs written by Paolo Benvegnù and Massimiliano Casacci of Subsonica. Once again, a mismatch between voice, songs and production is often felt.

Fully on target, however, is the song "Questa canzone," from Piccolino (2011). Here Mina stops looking elsewhere and sings the way she knows how. The track (Mario Nobile/Paolo Limiti) is a small gem: it starts out whiny, but immediately redeems itself with sophisticated, never ungraceful harmonic twists that let the melody breathe perfectly. In the opening line at 1'15", "no, non ti tradire con la gente," the singing becomes featherlight. Any other Italian singer would have belted it out here, but Mina caresses and freezes the moment, enhancing it with enchanting overtones. In the second opening line, "volevo solo dirti ancora," the voice opens up to become strangled, letting us hear the friction of the vocal cords, then slowly folds back, in a deeply felt way, on the "mai" of "non è passata…". The enchantment repeats, exponentially, at the close of the musical phrase as it grows ever more exhausted. The brief acoustic bridge relaunches the first melodic statement, told with heartfelt presence. A small, great wonder. There was a bit of game-playing in the promotion, with a media campaign launched to find the author of the "beautiful song with no credited author." An author nobody seemed to know (the track apparently emerged from an unlabeled tape, with nothing to establish credit). Who the author is, I've already written — he was close to home.

In 2004, Tiziano Ferro wrote "A chi ti dice" for the boy band Blue. A huge hit that becomes a display of outrageous vocal class in the voices of Mina and Fausto Leali (October 2016).

On February 10, 2017, something curious happened instead on the Ariston stage in Sanremo. Just as the controversial — and, looking back, rightly so — version of "Nessun dorma" had opened the edition of the Italian song festival par excellence in 2009, Mina's presence at the Ariston had been growing steadily, thanks in part to… Tim and the jingles for its commercials. In the year mentioned, Mina lends her voice, first speaking a few words and then singing "All Night," a track by Austrian DJ Marcus Fureder, danced by performer JSM. In 2018, on the same stage, Mina appears as a hologram in an "intergalactic digital opera," singing "Another Day Of Sun," and the result is rather surprising, both for the quality of the track, part of the soundtrack to the film "La La Land," and for the usual ease with which she handles swing as if it were air breathed daily.

The same thing happens again in 2019, with the track "Kiss The Sky" by Jason Derulo, and this time, helped also by the fact that the song belongs to the realm of established hits, the singer soars to frequencies untouched since the days of Kyrie, with a Black-music-inflected intensity that leaves listeners stunned — though here one could speak of energy, character, but perhaps it really must be said that the result is shrill, which one may like or not. In all three cases, it's the rhythmic nature that emerges, along with Mina's ability to possess a superhuman sense of rhythm in her vocal cords, something entirely natural to her. In the absence of capable voices — not just in character but also in technique — one might well wonder whether it was Mina who rightfully won the last three editions of the song contest.

The vocal form, after years of the bombast shown in the released outtakes, is all the more evident on Maeba. One track, the second single, rightfully stands among the most singular and at the same time most accomplished of the singer's output, both for its sonic material and for an interpretation that borders on the miraculous. I'm talking about "Il tuo arredamento". Credited to Zorama Mariano Rongo, "Il tuo arredamento" is a track built on harmonic progressions dear to 2000s progressive rock — hence drier, yet injected with electronic, hard-rock solutions and rhythmically solid, to the point it could rightfully sit on a Muse record, for instance. The lyrics are no less striking, edging close to the surrealist writing of Pasquale Panella in their take on everyday life acted out through mental and emotional associations. The voice starts in alto range, running into a tedious affectation on the word "la finestra" during the first verse. The only venial sin. A first harmonic modulation pushes the vocal into the middle register and everything changes. Vertigo, another modulation, and we climb into soprano frequencies. The electric guitar has a full-on indie-grunge tone. The second verse drops the initial low register and launches the vocal with even greater momentum, aided by a lovely Hammond organ sound. The voice is audible, playful, but runs into a whole palette of colors. The bridge kicks in with a nice wah-wah guitar solo, the "monstrous" chorus returns, the drums drowned in tons of effects searching for circularity and space, the voice clinging to the sky across tough major-sixth intervals, with grace. To close, a sigh and noise sounds. It feels unreal, almost like the commentary of a high-stakes football match, the frames rushing past in a quick reel-rewind, but ladies and gentlemen... it's really Mina! Pani calls the track "incantabile" [unsingable-yet-enchanting], and the claim isn't absurd at all — quite the opposite. This is one of Mina's best vocal performances ever, not only for technical skill but also for interpretive ability. It's genuinely strange to hear the voice, in places, take on something like a sob, as if to underline the mental strain — more than physical — of racing through so much material so quickly. Truly, a great moment!

Another beautiful track on the record is "Troppe note", chosen as the third single. This time the credit goes to Franco and Viola Serafini. The arrangement is superb, the team found the right path and understood not only that they had to push toward the new, but that they had to do it in an unprecedented way to remain credible. Everything is fresh, rhythmic, the melodic line doesn't shy away from constant repeated notes, the voice is doubled across two octaves and occasionally treated electronically. The harmonies aren't afraid to take risks, even within a thoroughly "pop" framework. Mina is clearly having fun. The orchestral intervention amid the full sonic texture works too. The sounds are genuinely beautiful, the mastering crystal clear. The ghost of the Battisti/Panella duo surfaces in the verses, but the chorus moves toward other shores. The carefree backing vocals feel a bit tacked-on, the only thing that doesn't quite work at times. The rest is anthology material, including all the instrumental contributions, every single one. An absolute monster of a track, without a doubt.

On November 2, 2018, on the anniversary of the death of the Italian genius whose memory has been desecrated by insults (Ostia, 2016: "Pasolini: what poet and mentor? He was a faggot and a pedophile, that's what he was!", Maurizio Boccacci of Militia) and ostracism, Mina posted a message on Twitter that of course sparked controversy, essentially saying that talking about Pasolini today risks doing harm, because it's done too rarely: "Today Pier Paolo Pasolini still divides the left, between those who remember him for his great works, and those who remind everyone that he paid minors. Infinite sadness."

In the meantime, something musical was already in the works — a compilation, of course, dedicated to the partnership with Battisti. One of the best, without doubt. Among the tracks, an unreleased one stands out. Mina sings "Vento nel vento", from "Il mio canto libero". Once again the choice is not to approach the song in an institutional way, and the result is compelling. The song's contemporaneity is rendered in a strictly present-day fashion. Singer-songwriter tradition meeting electronics, fusion touches shaping the arrangement, and black-music-style backing vocals on the chorus. Lovely horns, electric bass with lively, colorful phrasing, drums with a precise and very solid touch, piano in a gorgeous instrumental bridge, great electric guitar tone and vocal... simply textbook. There isn't a single note of excessive interpretation even if you go looking for it with a magnifying glass; the attention to nuance here becomes obsessive. The entrance has a marked breathiness in the voice that gives it a pure-black color, the intervals descend and welcome pathos along with grit perfectly integrated into the sound, before soaring on a deeply sensitive vibrato to passionately declaim "tra le tue braccia calde anche l'ultima paura morì". The chorus is sung full-voiced but without forcing, even the leap into the upper register is achieved with total elegance. The lyrics themselves do the rest. "E la stagione nuova dietro il vetro che appannava fiori", Mogol wrote, and it's lovely to hear these youthful words — "stesso desiderio di morire e poi rivivere" — from a voice young in color and spirit. There's also room for a beautiful high vocalise launching the closing instrumental section, before a sampled wind that evokes absence. Truly splendid.

The focus on "the new in music" could only lead to participation in a work representing contemporary Italian music par excellence, and it does so with "Angeli e demoni" by Mondo Marcio. A rapper, sure, but here on trap turf. Naturally the lyrics flow in a sort of alcohol-soaked stream made even more lucid in the depth of its content, and Mina lends herself well to the role of the "gangster's woman" of the moment, who for the occasion (the gangster) sings with an accent worthy of Don Lurio. Not only does it work, the track quickly becomes a genuine hit. Mina's voice turns disillusioned and utterly believable in the role.

That's the story so far — and of course, only a small account of it, told as a spectator with a lump in the throat, when really it would take Mina herself, living it, to tell it all with clarity, unafraid of losing anything, because there's nothing to lose, only more to welcome.

This story, which recounts 79 years of life and almost 61 of career, is not over and perhaps never will be. Of course, the international visibility eyed sideways, as if through a keyhole, for such a large part of her career — due to her absence from the stage — will perhaps never give the "Mina voice" the international recognition it deserves, and the very young, perhaps, still won't even come close to it. Why? The era of "great voices" seems to have shamefully faded away, making room for that of the "voices next door". Also, sign of the times, we've gone from a million copies sold per record to a few tens of thousands, and yet the "Mina phenomenon" is as much a miracle, from Italy to the whole world, as it is a string of disastrous choices. Necessary ones, though, all the same, as everything is when we can't give anything else and yet everything is being given. What to say about the embarrassing duets with Celentano? About the constant need to cash in and give her children and grandchildren — undeniably talented and likeable too — a steady presence in showbiz? All of it, too much, regardless, for better or worse — though, worse... if only that were the worst of it. Saying "she could have had", with hindsight, is easy; better to think about today, and that's being done better than one might imagine.

Mina is also a manager, but not one able to run the whole show single-handedly — not even Madonna is so domineering with the world and so indulgent with herself. Massimiliano Pani has taken on an enormous responsibility, echoed by the well-known commercial success that must be credited to him, a priori, along with undeniable courage. Besides this — no small feat to keep up over such a long stretch — what remains is a far-from-sparse list of songs that, scanning through them all, burn the eyes, knot the stomach and take the breath away; a few albums and the wonderful cover art. A case apart, these, in some instances even displayed in Contemporary Art galleries, a practice inaugurated with Attila, which, as mentioned, marks Pani's own debut as a songwriter for his mother, even before his role as producer. But then... who bears responsibility for the artistic choices remains an open question regardless. It's pointless and foolish to go looking for the "culprits" of what is crudely labeled an "absence of enlightened pens" — a laughable and arrogant claim, given the sheer volume of tapes sent to the address available to anyone on the web. A ridiculous notion, too, given the wish list of anyone who's ever opened their mouth to sing, listed earlier in the form of "monument songs". Choices were made and are still being made, and they belong to a team that is successful, though not always artistically agreeable — which is simply a fact, no offense meant to anyone, since I've managed to love even the silliest things anyway.

Vasco Rossi wrote "Donna particolare" (1983) for her, a track that remains unreleased to this day. When asked (in an article published on September 14, 2012) by Vanity Fair why she had never sung Franco Battiato, despite having "sung everyone", Mina replied: "Everyone except Francesco De Gregori, except Antonello Venditti, except Edoardo Bennato, except Angelo Branduardi, except Francesco Guccini, except Ligabue, except Biagio Antonacci, except Tiziano Ferro (note: later sung, as mentioned above). I almost forgot: except Caparezza, whom I adore."

And yet... that voice, which contains "everything" (or almost) and which dries up the ache of living — the same ache felt by her beloved Cesare Pavese — cannot and must not abandon us. Tim, after all, reminds us of it every day...

Funny thing... I had ended my 2019 piece on Mina by quoting Elisa, who described her as an example of perfect diction. The Tim Christmas ad uses a brief quote from "Stella stai" by Umberto Tozzi and repeats the word "scivola" several times. Too bad it comes out as "s(c)ivola". People endlessly joke about it, bringing up dentures, but in fact the little jingle works precisely because, paradoxically, nobody likes it yet it stays stuck in your head. The story goes that the idea arose from some joke within the Lugano team following the "scivola" sung in "Il tuo arredamento" by Zorama Mariano Rongo (alongside "Luna diamante", Mina's last truly great recording), and that the singer herself wanted to poke fun at it by repeating the thing eight times right in the title. The track is followed by another ad for the phone company featuring the famous "I sogni son desideri" (from Disney's "Cenerentola"), less brilliant but pleasant enough thanks to the performance on the higher frequencies; the rest is tedious.

Meanwhile, the historic underground project Le Forbici di Manitù, run by Vittore Baroni, releases, in a memorable multimedia effort (vinyl with artwork that functions as an almanac showcasing, through original creations, the best of illustration and mail art of recent decades + an arty DVD-R video for every track on the record), "Zona Minata". It's the first record ever to dare use exclusively tracks sung by Mina. Half of Italy's leading underground scene (and beyond) takes part, under names and pseudonyms: Uncodified, Sigillum S, Capricorni Pneumatici, Bruno Cossano, Samora, M.B., Nocturnal Emissions, Mind Invaders, The Haters, Noisedelik, Nightmare Lodge, My Cat Is an Alien, and then, leaving no one out besides those already named, Bruno Dorella, Corrado Altieri, Enrico Marani, Eraldo Bernocchi, Ivan Iusco, Massimo Olla, Maurizio Opalio, Paolo Bandera, Roberto Opalio, Russolo, Piermario Ciani, the English multimedia artist Nigel Ayers, the American musician Tom Mix, and the English artist Caroline K, who passed away in 2008. The project houses the most extensive Le Forbici di Manitù & Friends exhibition. A record (in the strictest sense) that anyone who loves Mina will hate outright, while anyone within the underground or avant-garde circuit will swallow effortlessly in one gulp and, should any judgment ever arise, will come to bless with time. The aesthetic value of the album makes sense in relation to the idea that generates it. The idea is to sing and dance over the ruins of the mainstream as we experience it today, going back to recover all of its cultural origins. An extreme manifesto of poetics in an era when that very word seems to have lost all meaning.

It's in September of that same year that the making of an album of unreleased Mina tracks, written by Fossati and sung as a duet with the Swiss-naturalized singer, is announced. Fossati clarifies that a joint record had been discussed back in 1996, but that record labels caused enough friction to prevent the project from getting off the ground — it finally began in 2017, after the songwriter's retirement from the scene and following a heartfelt request from Mrs. Fossati: "If you don't agree to sing with Mina, I'm filing for divorce" (quote).

In the meantime, on November 6, the album's first single "Tex-Mex" is released, and anyone expecting a new "Danza" (Mia Martini, 1978, written, produced, arranged and partly even played by the Genoese songwriter) immediately understands it's best to let it go.

A coffee shared between two, a few paper stars, and in the dark sky it's already tomorrow. That's why we're here.

(from "L'infinito di stelle")

It's 22 November 2019 when Mina Fossati is released by Pdu/Sony.

And so... a reunion, deep down. After that hinted-at moment in the 1978 live show at the Bussola (Mina Live '78) and a few subsequent meetings already mentioned, a return built on what remains rather than what might be, something of a reckoning with oneself, cherishing the small things without too many pretensions. Let it be Fossati for what we know of him and Mina for what we know of her, which is fine either way for whoever it's fine with. Like two old lovers meeting again for one last (?) evening.

The result? Mina Fossati is one of the ugliest records in Mina's discography and the worst in Fossati's. One of those albums that might look out of place even at the worst-dressed tea-and-burraco party, or in the homes of certain faux-classy ladies of a certain age, with no prejudice intended toward any of those worlds. Are there tracks worth saving? Of course, naturally and obviously. Come on! There are two geniuses here, plus some of the finest professionals around (and a couple of minor geniuses too, no diminutive intended).

"Luna Diamante" above all, no question, then "La guerra fredda" and "Come volano le nuvole". If we want to be generous, "L'infinito di stelle" too, and from the deluxe edition, "Settembre" sung by Fossati alone. Nothing else. In keeping with a piece that is, after all, more about songs than about the album as a whole, let me talk about the three tracks I find most successful.

"Luna diamante" is one of the most inspired pop songs Fossati has ever written in his career, and one of the finest Mina has ever sung. Amid all the sloppy rollout of this release, even this track was unjustly written off as a "cheesy earworm," not helped by the central role it plays in the key scene of Ferzan Ozpetek's "La dea fortuna" — but that's not what it is, and that's not what it should be taken for. The melody here is simply sublime; the voice indulges in a few too many theatrical excesses in the verses, reaching for false-register scratches worthy of Marina Fiordaliso, but when Mina hits the chorus she strips the words bare, curling the soul like horsehair on a bow, and everything is moving, perfectly faithful to the lyrics, amplifying them to the nth degree of expressionism. The arrangement stands apart from the rest of the album, finding the measured grace of Celso Valli, who in the closing section of the second and third chorus seems to bend the perception of time with a rubato of glissandi and staggered orchestral entrances lasting mere seconds — a device far closer to contemporary classical music than to pop at large. And then the voice trembles, trembles enough to shake everything in its path. There are no words to describe such communicative power, made even more intense by a vocal delivery roughened by time into wrinkles that are pure scratches on the soul. A triumph rather than a limitation, before which Fossati allows himself only one brief closed-mouth vocalise at the end, in unison across two different octaves, bowing — not obsequiously — before the greatest interpreter of them all.

Less inspired, but still worth a listen, are "La guerra fredda" and "Come volano le nuvole". The first conjures up the atmosphere of the worst bar in Caracas in slow motion, with a pitch-perfect arrangement built around Moriconi's fretless bass hitting straight in the gut, an opening from Fossati on vocals that sounds amused and very much "present," and a jarring lapse in taste in the lyrics with "l'amore si vende a milioni di copie" — stuff even the worst trap wouldn't dare — yet the narrative holds together. When the refrain arrives, Mina's voice sounds like a blessing, and everything suddenly turns airborne and strikingly modern. There's a great classical-guitar moment in the bridge before the final chorus. The instrumental coda works with just a few, but extremely well-calibrated, sounds of remarkable atmosphere and impact.

In "La guerra fredda" Mina's voice is, at the start, rather muddled in its diction — too much so — while Fossati's is as ever. The melody is beautiful, the lyrics even more so, the arrangement well judged, but it never gives the sense of knowing exactly what will happen next step by step, which keeps it from feeling like a classic, leaving just a touch of unwarranted tedium given such graceful songwriting. Even so, the emotion comes through, and therein lies the greatness of Fossati's writing and of a voice that, whatever else, is still there.

The release sells more than 50,000 copies, earning platinum status.

Meanwhile... in the thick of the pandemic, on 25 March of that year, for the 80th birthday of the Queen of Italian song, people were singing "Fiume azzurro" from the balconies of the housing blocks on Viale Ungheria in Milan, and plenty of us (myself included) joined in the chorus.

Then summer arrived, and while Tim dusted off "Brava" to great success and the astonishment of younger listeners who'd never heard that little marvel before, the millionth YouTube compilation appeared (Estate con voi 2020), without making any news at all. And yet it was there to say "look, I exist, and if you're musicians you should know it: for every song you register, for every concert you play, for every TV appearance or radio broadcast, I collect a tidy share from Siae as its top-earning member."

There was even talk of her possibly serving as artistic director of the 2021 Sanremo Festival (not to mention Al Bano's little stunt of nominating himself, saying he wanted just one woman by his side — Her), something she didn't refuse but which, apparently, wasn't taken up by Rai. The Festival went instead to Amadeus, who brought on as co-host that Achille Lauro ("an intelligent, sensitive young man," Pani told Il Messaggero, after a proposal for a duet collaboration with the singer), who, invited meanwhile to write a track for the singer's new album, responded: "Ho venduto l'anima a un diavolo e il mio cuore con dentro chi amavo solo per questo. Al suo servizio regina."

Mina can sniff out who knows how, or is able, to put on a show, as naturally as breathing in her sleep... The new album, as we were saying... for it, there was a stated wish for a track written by Vasco Rossi, but no announcement ever followed, after the episode years earlier when a track by that uniquely Italian singer-songwriter/star was turned down by Mina herself.

It's Christmas 2020 when Tim airs on television "the musical for Telecom Italy's 100th anniversary." An enormous deployment of resources, not just in computer animation, a passable song (this being Tim, i.e. "This Is Me" from the 2017 musical film "The Greatest Showman") sung objectively extremely well — enough that even those who don't follow the career of the "lady of the Voice" might be led to reckon with her age — but at this point the tedium becomes supreme. In the listener's mind, Mina no longer comes across as one of those artists who "do advertising," but as one of those who, once their career is over, move on to TV shopping channels. Of course that's not really the case: it's a statement of institutional status and the promise that this will never end. Mina has watched the theatre-voice of Milva at the court of Strehler (and a reread Brecht)/Berio/Piazzolla/Alda Merini/Battiato reduced to caricature and oblivion; she has seen the latest (mis)adventures of Ornella Vanoni and Patty Pravo turned into comic TV spectacle; she has seen the myth of Pizzi fade into forgetfulness. In the same way, she has understood that she could never count on the kind of full-scale reinvention pulled off by Giuni Russo, Antonella Ruggiero, Alice, Carmen Consoli, and she knows perfectly well that being a jazz monster like Tiziana Ghiglioni brings nothing but personal satisfaction and the sincere admiration of fellow musicians.

The time has passed for her to flame out tragically like Mia Martini and reap glory from it; she was too "noble" to redeem a glorious past in some other way, going pop as Rita Pavone, Orietta Berti and Loredana Bertè each tried to do in their own fashion; she isn't young enough to reinvent herself entirely in a pop key the way Elisa or Giorgia have; she isn't the teenage popstar that Laura Pausini still is; she doesn't have the "maudit" edge of Nada, the political militancy of Fiorella Mannoia, the haughty arrogance of Anna Oxa, the populist aggression of Gianna Nannini. You could say (perhaps) that she has "been too much" to ever allow herself to make a single, truly underground record in her life — something she lacks but doesn't believe in, otherwise she would surely have sung at least half a song somewhere among everything Lucio Battisti did from "Anima Latina" onward, just to name someone close to her. I recall, on this subject, a column in Blow Up called "Mission It's Possible," which floated, in a dadaist spirit, the idea of a "Mina sings Cave": I swear it scared me, but just imagining Nick, the Ink King himself, as producer would have had me laughing with joy for a century of lifetimes to come. Maybe with Antony Hegarty, who adores her and has also worked with Battiato? The affinity is there, a suitably grand orchestral direction is possible, and there are songs by the English "voice of the Century" that could easily lend themselves to a dance-flavoured take, Pani-style.

Just one chance in a world that by now forgets everything, even God in all His forms, or a mantra in the blink of an eye: becoming a Saint, herself an engine of the market, a portrait of media overexposure even amid absence/ubiquity, and sainthood has to be played for right up to the last day, with nothing held back.

Anyway, Tim alone is enough, isn't it? Were it not for a certain recording project, TimMina. Meanwhile, just days before her hundredth, on 4 January 2021 Tim has a crash.

A new trend is born online on YouTube. It's the "reaction to". Ordinary people, but also and especially voice and music teachers, offer to listen to tracks by artists in videos, all implausibly on first listen, becoming influencers. From Italy, who should be the first name taken abroad for this treatment? Well, Mina, of course! ThisisJoky1989 is the most prolific user in terms of videos published, but this is a growing trend spreading across the whole world. Joky (apologies, but I don't know if this is a pseudonym or a real name) has no doubts: however hard she finds it to understand the Italian as she listens to Mina, she's thrilled by "the sound", and there isn't a single track of hers, once put under the microscope, that doesn't earn pure praise line by line. She's understood everything, because that's what Mina is: an instrument made flesh/human being that investigates sound and its possible emission in every fraction of a second, and when even rationality alongside the singing goes out the window, the Mina system responds as a supreme sounding board, embracing every possible harmonic in expressive nuances equal to a spectrogram of the soul. Mary Setrakian, for her part, as a musical theatre teacher, in describing that masterpiece "E se domani", outlines not only vocal qualities but every slightest gesture of the performer in the video of the piece filmed for Spanish TV in 1966, identifying, as Fellini did in his day, the same ability to take care, as with singing, of every single instant of the performance.

It's 27 November when the singer's 52nd compilation is released. A double album with a double title, Cassiopea/Orione (2020).

Marianne Faithfull has said that the best way to look back on one's own life is through songs and photos, probably because looking at what's in between might make you feel sick. Well, the operation here is once again to put photographs together into a different puzzle, to show everyone that, if you want, even when there were wrinkles you could still be beautiful all the same—isn't this, after all, the age of FaceApp? An operation that this time works reasonably well. There are also two previously unreleased tracks in the mix, and here we happily return to talking about jazz.

There's a deluxe version of "Un tempo piccolo" (Franco Califano/Alberto Laurenti/Antonio Gaudino). The song, presented by Califano at the Sanremo Festival in 2005 and later covered by Tiromancino, is known to be as beautiful for its genuinely poetic lyrics as for its melody. Mina gives it a somewhat retro fusion key, but with the classic vocal delivery that never neglects half a syllable. Attention to phonetics for the sound of the words, for the sound of the singing, for the body's possible response in the delivery, intent on becoming a voice-instrument without any excess, languor yet visceral engagement in the interpretation. Singular class and a result just as commendable in its execution, for all its lightness, because of course plenty of people come here looking for miracles when miracles can also be worked in the most absolute simplicity of expression.

In "Cielo dei bars" (Fred Buscaglione/Leo Chiosso), she's instead the more directly jazzy of the two, with Danilo Rea and Moriconi very much in evidence. Here she becomes a wind instrument again, fragmenting every suspension of sound and blowing the high notes as if coating them in spun sugar. Every so often she scratches, and it's a scratch like "whisky at the bottom of the glass". The 1950s-style "io Pani" backing vocals dotted here and there as onomatopoeia are pathetic, but sadly a pathos we've heard far too often (I know, you'll say "fun" and, well, fair enough...). A little less would have sufficed, but the structure is solid, it comes through, caresses, comforts, offers pure listening pleasure.

Then, and just as surprisingly, the Christmas studio album never arrived. And this, of all things, is the most surprising part. Could it be a pitiful tribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths turned into more of a spectacle than she is (regardless of official, reductionist or conspiracist positions), while in Switzerland people keep skiing, accepting the sacrifice of a "non-productive" generation on a par with people with pre-existing conditions (the disabled included, and the lady is 80 years old) for the benefit of those who don't want it known where curious profits end up? She's earned them, no doubt about it.

Waiting four years for a new Mina studio album is something entirely unprecedented in the singer's long career, but then again, in this short span of time, everything happened. The world changed and everyone suddenly found themselves already old in a flash. Not only that, Mina splits from Tim and is no longer heard with obsessive constancy on television, on the radio, in the subway. She announces she wants to sing a track written for her by Vasco Rossi and one written by Achille Lauro, but the first doesn't get her attention, the second crowns her "queen", but then nothing comes of it.

Something does happen though, beyond unworkable compilations of previously released material or stuff heard on some media outlet and lumped together in questionable fashion (the venial Delightful excesses from 2022 and the rather ugly Beatles Songbook from the same year): the entire 2001 live studio session known as "Mina in the studio" is released (only on vinyl, USB and as NFT art), which as a now out-of-print DVD had become one of the singer's greatest fetish objects.

It arrives with unreleased tracks and a new song recorded in the same sessions in 2021, and it's no accident that the release is titled Mina in the studio 2011-2021. The new track ("Accarezzame") adds grace upon grace, but the album as a whole is a timeless masterpiece, both in the moments with the fusion band accompanying her voice and in the most precious orchestral moments.

Stunning, besides the now-famous "Oggi sono io" by Alex Britti, are "Ma come hai fatto" by Domenico Modugno, "The Nearness Of You" sung at the edge of heaven with an Oscar-worthy grace and sensuality, "Tu si' na cosa grande" with a high-note introduction of genuine astonishment (which, incidentally, was also the title of the album in which the song was originally introduced, far removed from this session), followed by Arabic-sounding vocalizations that seem drawn from the call of a muezzin, as had been the case with her interpretation of "Maruzzella" on Naples Vol 1. These great masterpieces alone would be enough to dispel any doubt about the authenticity of the project, which on record thankfully loses its showiest, most radical chic inflection in favour of greater austerity. The band is sensational, but above all, the greatest praise goes to a superb Danilo Rea, on both piano and accordion.

83 candles must be blown out to celebrate a full 65 years of career with a new studio album arriving with news bound to give many of her fans sleepless nights: Mina will duet on a track with Blanco, who just a few months earlier, on the Ariston stage at Sanremo, destroyed the flower set dedicated to him and interrupted the performance of his own song to launch the video for "L'Isola delle Rose" (or at least that's one of the many narratives attached to the event, which was much disputed). Mina and Massimiliano Pani, for their part, just as they had done with Achille Lauro, will say of the young singer-songwriter that "he's very sensitive", but in fact the track arrives at the Lugano studios a step away from the album's release, which gets held up so the already-arranged single, with excellent radio potential, can be inserted, with the singer lending it her unmistakable voice and an unplanned, enchanting coda. Once the track comes out, pretty much no one has anything to say and the success is huge—indeed, the biggest since 1973, fifty years after her last number-one single ("E poi.../Non tornare più")! The same won't be true for the album though, which won't climb past fourth place in the charts, a spot Blanco will overtake, riding the top of the chart for a while with his "Innamorato".

The promotion for Ti amo come un pazzo (2023) is entirely built around the dynamics of recording, composition, arrangement and the choice of single (Blanco and Mina in fact never met). Michelangelo, Blanco's producer, is a constant presence alongside Massimiliano Pani. The story of a concept album inspired by feuilletons, that is photo-romance magazines, gets invented, except that the record contains a track that has nothing whatsoever to do with love songs ("Don Salvato'" by Enzo Avitabile), and that almost all of Mina's records talk about nothing but love.

The opening track sets the tone for the mood of the whole record. It's reportedly a new chapter dedicated to Özpetek, called "Buttare l'amore", superbly arranged with a truly sensational Luca Meneghello on acoustic guitar. The backing vocals, on the other hand, are dreadful, though thankfully so sparing in their presence as to be a venial sin. The melodic line isn't bad at all, but the singer overdoes it heavily and the result comes off as almost farcical, like an impression of Loretta Goggi. The words come out chewed-over, delivered with so much breath behind them, fussed over with a theatrical attention to detail that captures only the form of theatre, not its substance. The amount of mannered preciousness on display is beyond counting. A shame, but in my opinion, this one just doesn't hit the mark.

The deeply Nineties sound of “Come la Luna” makes you doubt the credited author is really Zucchero Fornaciari, rather than one of the names actually listed. Mina, for her part, really apes the Emilian singer-songwriter, even in a certain throatiness of delivery that turns her “e” vowels into something closer to a “u”. The clarity of the vocal entries in the chorus, however, is magnificent, almost adolescent in sound. The track ends with a hint of a guitar solo that fades into a very brief coda.

There's been a lot of talk about the interpretation of “Don Salvato'”, written by Enzo Avitabile. Both the fusion arrangement (Pani's sampled bass ostinato is superb) and the performance work well, even if the singer's Neapolitan pronunciation here is simply non-existent. Truly ugly, on the other hand, is the “Ave Verum” that closes the track. Not a happy choice, including it on an album of love songs with which it really has nothing in common, and which probably would have needed far more space given to the instrumental section than to the mumbled vocal declamation.

Fortunately, at least in terms of coherence and context, “Fino a domani” marks a complete change of register. Federico Spagnoli's beautiful, airy melody brings together Claudio Baglioni and Renato Zero. When the song takes off, Mina works her magic and turns it all into a gem of dramatic interpretation. Granted, nothing new here (if the track had come out in 1985 or in 1992, no one would have noticed the geological eras of music that had passed in between), but a pleasant listen all the same.

Something really does change, though, with “Zum pa pa”, a track that ranks among the best in the singer's entire discography and stands as the absolute peak of this album. The verses are delivered in a strongly 'spoken' manner, more recited than sung. It somewhat recalls the muttered whisper of Nina Simone on “And Piano!”, and it's no coincidence that the song needs very little to take on meaning amid its constantly shifting harmonic colors. The lyrics are good too, questioning a circus spectator about whether he might be the “tightrope walker or the white rabbit”.

“Tutto quello che un uomo” is a cover of a Sergio Cammariere song, and rather than a jazz tune it comes across as a Brechtian farce of one. Mina tiptoes in, weaving her vibrato between the notes, turning her voice into a wind instrument alongside Ugo Bongianni's piano and Pani's almost cartoonish backing vocals. A kind of “game”, not exactly memorable but undeniably well made, an elegant little interlude straight out of a high-class piano bar.

“L'orto” revives the playful spirit of past tracks like “'A Minestrina” (from Maeba, 2018), “Bell'animalone” (from Bula Bula, 2005), “Ma che bontà” (from Mina con bignè, 1977), or the most playful of her Battisti covers (“Luci-ah”). It's fun and very well done. Mina is terrific in her delivery, but Pani on backing vocals is truly superb. The arrangement is lovely, showcasing Luca Meneghello's guitars in particular. The ending is irresistible.

“Lascia”, on the other hand, is the track that truly sounds dated. It's an old-school adult pop ballad whose chorus harmonies recall Pooh's “Uomini soli” a little. Nothing special, though the performance is remarkable and leaves no room for doubt. For those not used to pop, the track may feel genuinely stifling. It's followed by “Non ho più bisogno di te”, whose bolero, in the first two bars of the verse (forgive me, but believe it or not in Lugano you really hear all sorts of things), calls to mind the desert expanses evoked by Nick Cave in his “Loverman”, though it ends up tacky, saccharine, and utterly lacking either the stigmata or the schizoid convulsions of that song. I honestly wonder where such a misguided idea came from, on the part of whoever chose and arranged this track.

At this point in the album you start to feel the need for a bit of spark, something that hasn't really emerged through half the record so far, and along comes Blanco's notorious single, “Un briciolo di allegria”, number one on the Fimi singles chart for eight consecutive weeks and the ultimate earworm of spring 2023. Michelangelo's production puts everything in order and delivers a track that's not exactly unforgettable but fresh, well crafted, just the right amount of brash, leaving plenty of room for all the nuances of Mina's voice, while relegating the young trapper to something like a mangy cat with breathless falsettos, lacking in overtones, pitchy, and with a pronunciation so affected it borders on the absurd (“come foto Polaroid” is genuinely embarrassing). The a cappella conclusion by the “Tigress”, however, is as spine-tingling as the return of her voice at 1:34. The two timbres hold together, but between the two voices there's an unbridgeable gulf.

“La gabbia” by Maurizio Morante is left only on the CD or the digital version (!), yet it delivers the release's other masterpiece, as well as its most intense performance, one that truly moves you to tears. A funereal romance, perhaps a little ragged in the singing at times, but my God, what a voice and what a pulsing soul behind it! Mina is so intense here that she becomes almost repellent. It stirs an emotion bordering on embarrassment, and on this one track alone you want to say: “no, there's no one like her, and there never has been.” The only unpleasant things about the track are the pointless backing vocals and some orchestral cymbals that are, on top of it, sampled... Go figure.

That's not all! The other track left off the vinyl is “Povero amore” (also destined for Özpetek, but in this case for the film “Nuovo Olimpo” rather than the TV series “Le fate ignoranti”, echoing the director's famous film) which unfurls the best arrangement on the record, almost pleasantly techno-pop, recalling the best Matia Bazar of the late 80s. The melody is lovely, better in the verses than in the chorus, where instead the vocal line finds, in its open phrases, a crepuscular melancholy that lingers over the whole album. The arrangement also brings out, to great effect, Lorenzo Poli's electric bass and especially Gabriele Comeglio's tenor sax.

Ti amo come un pazzo is an album largely defined by strong songwriting, near-perfect arrangements, and vocals that are almost always literally divine, but it's also a work that comes across as endlessly melancholy, as if contemplating an entire life slipping away. There's no denying that, to young ears, a record like this might come across as a poorly preserved portrait of Dorian Gray. It's also a “resigned” album, one that only truly wounds in a couple of moments, but which overall stands as the only album of new Mina material in a long while that can be listened to from start to finish without stirring either excessive enthusiasm or embarrassment.

Enough? Yes, having reached her 72nd album of new material, enough. Credit to the whole team. The feeling is that, in trying to win over new generations with a single track, this album has ended up permanently relegating Mina to a past, however glorious, something that Maeba had managed to avoid — partly, admittedly, thanks to the epochal cultural shift that occurred in the meantime, but also due to a misjudgment.

Or, one need only read this excerpt from a 1978 interview:

Rita Madaro: “Are you afraid of growing old? Musically speaking, I mean…”

Mina: “Absolutely not. I do what I do. As long as it works, it works. When it stops working, well, thanks, it was a fun and pleasant thing. The end. My life is something else entirely — it's certainly not little songs that fill it up.”

Following the previous album came another more or less pointless volume of “Delightful excesses”, the announcement of yet another record of love songs, and the renewed collaboration with Ferzan Ozpetek that hinted at staleness… So what then? As always, to carry on between love for her children and grandchildren, loyal friendship with her musicians, a studio forever ready to become a mirror and backdrop for a soul of many facets, but perhaps, no longer a restless one?

The cover of Gassa d’amante (2024), made with AI, immediately echoes the times it belongs to. Magnificent, really, imposing. I work up the courage and play the track not included on the album, which precedes it by a little… Ozpetek is its dedicatee. Gabriele Comeglio on orchestra lends Mahlerian ripples to the ensemble that lift it from an otherwise worthless canvas. A shame, really nothing else to add. “Non smetto di aspettarti” is by Fabio Concato, and it sounds good, very good in fact, with the voice rising in the crescendo with a fullness of overtones into forgotten mezzo-soprano frequencies. A clarity resting on low tones while summoning the greatest divas of jazz. With phrasing that is always and only that arc between earth and sky which no one else could ever render with the same steadiness. A lovely guitar solo with tightly chromatic figures. The voice returns with a touch too much pathos, but the climb into the upper register is the enchantment of a young jazz-singing talent, to whom we already owe, if not everything, then a great deal — perhaps even too much.

After so much beauty… Massimiliano Pani. A timeless romance, with gorgeous harmonies, although, as is almost always the case, it's the crescendo into the upper register that truly wounds, as it rarely has before. Want to give an album as a slight to anyone who believes they no longer have a soul? Well, in certain moments of supreme grace, this is the record — up to this point gorgeous, refined in its harmonies and melodic lines, all of it alive in a voice that becomes thunder once again. Then, unfortunately, “Per dirti t’amo” is of boundless banality (quite the Ariete, a halfway measure that barely registers). A similar track has been heard many times before in this singer's discography, who never passes up fine vocalizing, paired with the usual distorted vowels “blaring” like a small jazz orchestra from the Po Valley lowlands, here on an ugly adult-oriented pop track that indulges in lyrics like “sai che morirò d’amore” (by now…) and anguished singing as of a woman abandoned to her own memories, left to grow musty in a cellar. A parenthesis, one hopes.

“Amami e basta” is indeed the album's absolute masterpiece, and the most modern track in sound, in basic architecture, in vocal delivery. In every respect. It opens with a couple of piano chords and it already runs right through you. It's the point of no return: whatever happens with the rest of the album, you know deep down you won't be able to forget such contemporary elegance turned into timeless emotional power. A composition that is hardly pop at all, with suspended atmospheres, that sounds as if sung by a fifteen-year-old girl. A ballad from across the Channel that seems like a gift from the early Thom Yorke (don't assume that someone old, propped up/crushed by a team obsessed with mind-blowing sales, bowing and scraping and ruthless cruelty, has no ear or discernment). Simple yet perfect, precious, with a formal structure that's anything but predictable. Something you could fully call “an ultramodern auteur painting”. When the drums kick in (with clangs of electricity giving it more room) and the voice turns grey, it feels like setting off into hyperspace. Only the very brief backing vocals are dreadful, unworthy of supporting the main instrument, which here becomes pure grace, surrendering to time in a lascivious and deeply anguished way (the voice breaking on the first “basta” is a genuine shiver). Kudos to Antonino Luca Tudisca, author of both music and lyrics.

Right after comes the other absolute gem, “Senza farmi male”, penned by Elisa, the only single of note on the release. The hook is pure Mina, it explodes like a perfectly timed bomb or a dream come true… light, it becomes a thousand choirs, right up to clinging to a well-sustained falsetto E from the diaphragm (remember Britti's “Oggi sono io”? Well, we're right in that territory but with a very different dramatic and electronic emphasis of great taste, elusive as fog, yet pulsing). A pure gem.

The same electronics return at the start of “Il cuore si sbaglia”. The delivery, though, is forced from the very beginning, bordering on the grotesque. She doesn't take it seriously in the least, singing of love as if she could be talking about the rising price of cherries, while hurling the worst verdicts at some imaginary man (one hopes). The backing vocals have a vintage feel that is amusingly “perverse”, so very “trendy” in the gay scene. Had it been sung in a drier, more restrained way and presented, say, at Sanremo, it might have had some chance in the rankings, nudging aside Marcella Bella. A track that's neither good nor bad. Not even light, on closer inspection — strange, almost expressionist, if the arrangement didn't stand in total contrast to the marked expressions of a face belonging to memory, one that pops up in her sole Brecht interpretation, a “Surabaya Johnny” that isn't exactly memorable.

An “Italian-style rock” guitar riff opens the track. “È così che funziona” and everything changes, folks, “altro giro, altra giostra!”. We're dealing with one of those songs that, sung by Bertè, would have hit the mark dead center; sung by Mina, well… Don't get us wrong, it's not a bad song, even with some overly forced rhymes in the lyrics, but as usual That Voice saves everything, needing no rough edges to sound genuine. The small, but truly “small” problem is that the track feels like “L'importante è finire”, for instance, which isn't rock at all, and plays up the farce like a drama queen. Meh. Francesco Gabbani's “Buttalo via” doesn't come close to repeating the miracle of “Un sorriso dentro il pianto”, written for Ornella Vanoni. It's not bad, mind you, but it's as predictable as the fact that it was chosen as the first of the three singles. The focus stays, as ever, on mid-high frequencies, magnificent, brimming with overtones. The electric guitar counterpoints are tedious, dragging things back at least thirty years. A bit more, nothing less.

A magnificent gust of strings opens “L'amore vero”, a vintage postcard of a song, with a voice that might have been more convincing a tone higher (or even two). What's the point of presenting yourself as vocally rejuvenated, as if by miracle, only to then sing a track so hopelessly “old”? Back come the usual Baci Perugina-style lines (oops… Sperlari candies, for which the singer is now a spokesperson with both her singing and her spoken voice) along the lines of “l'amore vero non finisce mai”. For fans well into their “-ties”.

Here is an Italy that no longer exists and that, given the current state of things, perhaps never had any real reason to exist, yet it still leaves even those who lived through and endured it with a certain lump in the throat. Banal, hypocritical, but dressed up for the occasion, with a love so excessively cholesterol-laden it wears you out over the course of a single track. Christmas lunch with relatives who hate you, having to expose yourself to judgment (a fear Mina no longer has, and here, firstly, lies the album's enormous merit).

Closing with yet another utterly fake slash of electric guitar on “Non ti lascerò”, however, is simply maddening beyond reason. Fine, a good arrangement, but set against vocals that, I'm sorry to say, are utterly fake, dreadful. The modulation into the upper register is a shameful cliché, and the mocking way a feeling is treated, turned into a joke, is here irritating beyond measure. It's bad vaudeville — truly bad.

This is not an album that sings of love. At times it's a farce devoid of any dignity in its emotional “worth”. There are four tracks worth saving, and all of supreme beauty (“Amami e basta”, “Senza farmi male”, “Non smetto di aspettarti”, “Dispersa”); on their own they'd be worth a nine, but there are ten tracks, not four. Let's pretend to forget about the rest and move on to the mitigating factors:

1) This is the best-sung record by Mina since “Mina in Studio (2001/2021)”, which, by a strange coincidence, was reissued this month on CD, after previous editions released only on video and on audio via USB stick or vinyl. There is, in fact, no qualitative link between that live album (a masterpiece) and this one, which is, as is typical of her, “a collection of songs ranging from Zenith to Nadir”.

2) It is, in any case, the riskiest project since “Maeba”. If you put together the best tracks from this record and that one, you'd get something extraordinary, but that, sadly, isn't the case here.

Markedly more modern than any album by the singer, even going back to “Kyrie” (1980 — a record worth owning or dusting off), Gassa d'amante is a better work than Ti amo come un pazzo and Mina Fossati, her previous releases.

Appendix

Some opinions expressed about Mina by international artists, not only from the world of music, for better or worse.

Much has already been written here about what Fabrizio De André said of her, the criticisms levelled by Giuni Russo, and countless other comments on her career, but to close out what I offer here as a sincere tribute — from someone who sees in her not only an elective mother, but truly and literally a parallel to his own real mother — I'd like to cite a series of statements made by internationally renowned artists on the subject of Mina. I believe each of these, beyond their literal content, carries a kind of devotion, expressed with varying degrees of reverence, the way one speaks to a God, whether in prayer or in blasphemy.

In a premonition that would prove far truer than its author ever imagined, Gilbert Bécaud said in 1966: “You, Mina, have only one flaw. That of having been born in Italy. If you had been born in France, by now you'd be a national monument. The way Piaf was. The way Brigitte Bardot is. Or Moreau. And people, journalists, photographers, aware and grateful for that escape from reality which you offer with your voice, your songs, your undeniable charm, would be grateful to you. They would show you admiration. Not in Italy, you know that too. The better you become, the more the public, people, who knows why, will turn against you to destroy you.”

Dario Fo: “That way she has of moving, seemingly out of time, raising her arms and spinning them as though striking a series of sculptural poses — those are things that belong to her alone, and they arrive even before the voice does.”

Federico Fellini, again in 1966: “I'd like to try her as an actress. Mina has the face of the moon. Her eyes are sweet and cruel. Her mouth calls comets down from the sky: all it takes is a whistle.” It's worth noting that Mina was also called in front of a camera by Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francis Ford Coppola. She herself once said, “Cinema doesn't interest me, and I realized I don't know how to act.”

Mia Martini, after attending her last concert at the Bussola, said: “I don't think she has an equal among us white artists. Streisand? Please: Mina doesn't do easy listening, what she does is jazz, almost always, even when she's singing 'Insieme'.” In an interview given at the end of 1994, she went on to say: “In my opinion, she's the greatest artist we have in Italy, full stop. I'm crazy about her, I love her recent work, even if she doesn't seem to be around much these days. And I'll confess I'd love to sing something with Mina. And if she were ever to go back to singing live, I'd walk there on foot, in procession with all the other fans.”

Nilla Pizzi: “Mina is the greatest of them all, the best. And precisely for that reason, she can't just vanish into thin air. She has a duty to be seen, to be heard. Her records aren't enough. It's her, in flesh and blood, that we want” (quoted in Nino Romano, “Mina. Mito e mistero”, Sperling & Kupfer Editori, Milan, 1996).

Riccardo Muti, on the subject of the new Teatro degli Arcimboldi, on 17 December 2002: “The Arcimboldi in Milan could become what Carnegie Hall has become in London: a prestigious stage able to host top-tier stars of jazz and pop as well, the likes of Mina and Barbra Streisand.”

Carlo Verdone, on Rockon.it, 31 August 2016: “The only truly great artist we have.”

Patty Pravo, on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday (April 2008), said in an interview with Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni: “With that voice of hers she could be breaking new ground, but instead her recent work is banal. She only does it for the money.” An even more pointed criticism would be levelled at the album “Sulla tua bocca lo dirò”, in an exchange of barbs with Pippo Baudo on Rai 1.

Even the Osservatore Romano had harsh words for that same album.

Rettore, on Libero.it, 11 September 2008, weighing in on Mina's supposed lack of material suited to her recent output, pronounced that “she sings like a washerwoman,” and then again on Scalo 76, on Rai 2, 18 October 2008, said she “screeches.” The colourful remarks referred to her current repertoire, certainly, but also to a particular way of interpreting a song. The “Dada of Italian music” had sung “Grande grande grande” back in 1996, during the Festival della Canzone Regina on Canale 5, in a rather parodic fashion, with the means to pull it off, pitch aside. The matter was later substantially reframed with an “only I and Mina can sing my songs,” a clear nod to shared irony and a knack for handling a song's rhythm.

Liza Minnelli, on “Porta a Porta” on 9 October 2008, when Pippo Baudo asked her “which Italian song keeps coming back to you?”, seemed to seize the opportunity to say what really mattered to her: “I always think of Mina… she's the greatest singer I've ever heard,” and then went on, “she is to music what De Niro is to acting… she's one of a kind.”

Claudio Abbado, on 9 November 2009, on La Repubblica.it: “Luigi Nono wanted to compose a piece for her voice. 'Even just one sound, one note, would be enough for me,' he told me. I would have loved to conduct her — I've always admired her.”

On 25 March 2010, the newspaper La Stampa tried to reach singers of Mina's generation, spanning the last 60 years. It reported verbatim: “Girls from the new generation answered right away (Noemi, Nina Zilli, Malika Ayane…), and two great ladies, Caterina Caselli and Ornella Vanoni, the last of the grand dames, called back.

Phones were switched off, however, among a few ladies of contemporary song. Not a word from Pausini and Giorgia (busy nursing). Silence from Mannoia, and even the talented Carmencita Consoli snubbed both texts and calls.”

In fact, Giorgia expressed her thoughts on Mina clearly and directly on Rai 1 ("Doreciackgulp", Tg 1, 5 April 2014), with a heartfelt tribute. Not only that: Laura Pausini, after many tributes to the singer from Cremona, including a duet with Eros Ramazzotti, had already stated on 12 July 2007: "I dream of a duet with Mina, she's never sung with another woman." A recognition among the many "switched-off phones" that will have had their own reasons for not picking up, the same recognition carried by the "new generation girls" and the "last great ladies" of song.

Ornella Vanoni, after wistfully referring to the good fortune of a lasting affection that was never hers: "Not only is she a great singer, but when she arrived she brought joy into Italian pop music."

Caterina Caselli: "She has been and still is an institution. A person of real character."

Irene Grandi: "Despite having incredible technique and outstanding talent, Mina places great importance on how she interprets the words."

Malika Ayane: "When I listen to her I feel utterly useless."

Noemi: "A song is like a dress, and she's a perfect tailor."

Nina Zilli: "I see her as a goddess atop an Olympus."

Emma Re, for her part, speaks of an entire recital dedicated to Mina, held in Paris on behalf of Pierre Cardin.

Gino Paoli on "Il cielo in una stanza" ("Un Giorno da pecora", Radio2 – 19 November 2010): "Bruni is the only one who sang the song without turning it into something else. Carla Bruni did it better, because Mina sings 'Il cielo in una stanza' and the phone book the same way. I don't know whether she knows what she's singing or not, she sings as if she were an extraordinary technical instrument, like a flute or a guitar."

Holly (who remembers her? Sung by Lou Reed, in "Walk On The Wild Side"), from an interview given to Paola Jacobbe in 2010 and published in Vanity Fair on 27 October 2013. Paola Jacobbe says: "She asks me about Mina, a singer she adores. And then, looking towards the little terrace, she invites me to sing 'Il cielo in una stanza' with her. She knows the words by heart, like someone who has known not one, but a thousand purple ceilings."

Antony Hegarty, after his appearance at Sanremo, told Il Giornale (15 February 2013), speaking of Battiato: "Franco is my best Italian friend. But I'm also crazy about Mina."

For her 75th birthday, on 25 March 2015 Rolling Stone Italy published a selection of thoughts dedicated to Mina from some of the greatest international artists of all time:

Mick Jagger (2002): "People like me, Tina Turner, Paul McCartney and, in Italy, people with an angelic voice like Mina, we've kept our teenage vitality because we never gave in to any kind of compromise…"

Elvis Costello (2002): "Mina is the greatest Italian singer and I don't understand how it took me so long to notice. She reminds me of Dusty Springfield. I discovered her by chance, poking my nose – and my ear – through my wife's records; she studies your language and runs a radio show that often features Italian songs. With Mina it was something like a revelation, and I went straight out and bought all her albums. And besides, I love Italy…"

Andy Warhol (1972): "Mina? A born actress, a symbol of technological civilization, a lunar ghost, aggressive and a little bit pop…"

Céline Dion (2010): “Luciano Pavarotti would always talk to me about Mina, and not only when we performed the English-language duet version of Grande grande grande. I was born in March too, just like Mina; I also think of her voice as an immense, inimitable gift of nature, the reflection of a soul.”

Johnny Marr of the Smiths (2011): “I was watching an old BBC documentary about Ennio Morricone, and in the background you could hear a song playing. I did a bit of digging and found out it was Mina's Se telefonando. I was stunned. It's basically Morricone condensed into three minutes, and Mina is a seriously tough rebel girl, a kind of Italian Lesley Gore. The boldness of that song is matched by her personality and talent.”

More about her…

Milva, on Rai 1, interviewed by Paola Perego on 21 October 2010: “Mina was the most gifted.”

Iosonouncane, on Rockit, 4 June 2015: “When Mina sings, everyone falls silent.”

Iva Zanicchi, on 30 August 2018, after a wave of negative comments highlighting Mina's “loose morals” (“she's had plenty of them, she's given us a lot…” on #CR4 La repubblica delle donne) and the “greater vocal gift” within the Zanicchi household (IRIS, Rome, 26 March 2012: “The greatest of the past is Mina, for her musicality. But Iva Zanicchi's voice is twenty times Mina's… if we're talking about jazz and improvising, she's the greatest. The one who sings in a warm, natural way is me”), states: “I had great admiration for her… she outclassed everyone with her voice, her way of gesturing, so modern.”

Elisa, on Rai 1, interviewed by Fabio Fazio on “Che tempo che fa”, 11 November 2018: “Every female singer studies Mina. Even just for the way she tackled every high note with her incredible range, and for her diction.”

…No, this story is not only unfinished, it's destined to shine even brighter. I've written about it only so that others, more skilled than me, might do the same and, above all, do it better than I have.

Recommended bibliography:

Franco Fabbri and Luigi Pestalozza – Mina. Una forza incantatrice (Euresis, 1998)

Ride the wave of great music

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