Paolo Conte - A whole tangle of things

Paolo Conte is one of the most original Italian singer-songwriters, and certainly the most erudite and consistent. His style grew out of a fusion between the phantasmagoric lullabies of Leonard Cohen, the sensibility of early-20th-century Parisian street balladeers, the jazz big bands of Duke Ellington and Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz-pop song sensibility of Hoagy Carmichael, and the chanson of Jacques Brel. To this must certainly be added an erudite approach to lyric-writing, always balanced between unbridled passions, the melancholy of past memories, elegant and refined spirits, and images that spontaneously shift toward synaesthesia and belle-époque symbolism, occasionally giving way to a reserved hermeticism.

His two instruments, piano and voice (even before the songs themselves), would pave the way for one of the most seductive cross-pollinations ever heard within the landscape of Italian songwriting, while also contributing the not insignificant achievement of opening the door to a philological, classicist rediscovery (thus quite removed from the experiments of the Cramps label crowd, Perigeo, etc.) of jazz music in Italy, until then kept forcibly in the shadows. Conte the performer, ultimately, comes across as a decadent chanteur, detached, oblique and noble all at once, with a husky, deep vocal timbre, sweetly biting, sharp and anti-rhetorical.

Paolo Conte was born in 1937 in Asti, into a family of lawyers. During the war he spent a lot of time on his grandfather's farm, where one of the first chapters of his development took shape: respect for the diversity of cultures and, at the same time, for his own place of origin. Through his parents (fans of both classical music and popular song) he learned the rudiments of piano, alongside his younger brother Giorgio, but his true musical passion arrived in the immediate postwar years. The advent of the modern cinema era, alongside the marches of American military bands, and above all listening to records and concerts by touring American musicians, sparked Conte's first budding love for jazz music.

After graduating in Law from the University of Parma, he began working as an assistant at his father's law practice, while deciding to pursue his musical studies on a semi-professional level. Those were the years of his first bands, whose names betrayed his euphoria for jazz and swing from across the Atlantic: Barrelhouse Jazz Band, Taxi for Five, The Lazy River Band Society. The most successful of the bunch, the Paul Conte Quartet (which also featured his brother Giorgio on guitar, while Paolo played vibraphone), went on to record an LP of jazz standards for Rca (“The Italian Way to Swing”).

Alongside this, his passion for Italian song was born and developed, filtered both through radio broadcasts and through his interest in popular traditions, particularly Neapolitan song and the chanson of Brel and Brassens. It is perhaps thanks to that lucid, anti-rhetorical narrative poetics, those disenchanted yet idealized glances at (mis)adventures of alienation and cynicism, at grotesque yet unsparing farce about contemporary society, that Conte began writing his first songs, destined for interpretation by Italian and international artists, at first without a lyricist alongside his brother, and only later also working on lyrics together with Vito Pallavicini. Thus, in the second half of the Sixties, came “Siamo la coppia più bella del mondo” (Conte's de facto solo debut, with lyrics by Luciano Beretta and Miki Del Prete, an immediate number-one hit) and “Azzurro” for Adriano Celentano, “Insieme a te non ci sto più” for Caterina Caselli, “Tripoli '69”, “Genova per noi” and “Onda su onda” for Bruno Lauzi (also co-writer), “Messico e nuvole” for Enzo Jannacci, “Grin grin grin” and “Se (Yes)” for Carmen Villani, along with other collaborations with Patti Pravo, Johnny Hallyday and Shirley Bassey.

These early signs of his detached style, reflective with wit and biting irony, overflowing with loose-limbed imagery, would be channeled and burst fully into bloom on his first album under his own name, Paolo Conte (Rca, 1974), on which he appears not only as composer and lyricist but also as performer, singer and arranger. It's a still-uncertain collection, not quite in focus, almost a revisionist anthology of works previously lent to other artists, built around pieces like “Fisarmonica di Stradella” and orchestrated with an artisanal simplicity that only occasionally lets the genuine talent of his mature work shine through. This album is also the first chapter of a trilogy dedicated to his transition from law-office clerk to singer-songwriter tout court. It is populated by the ghosts of a provincial world wrecked by an absent, bored existence, wrapped in a membrane of latent hypocrisy, by repressed and unspoken anxieties, but also fleshed out by intimate emotions, infused with moving episodes gathered with great care.

In this first creative period, Conte gave birth to the first two installments of the notorious saga devoted to the “Uomo del Mocambo” [Man of the Mocambo], the story of the owner of a legendary bar — a backdrop for decadent situations, failed caretakers (aided here by a refined autobiographical spirit), the inability to communicate between cohabitants, “maroon” sitting rooms, architectural façades (signs, lights, etc.) elevated to symbols of a generational mood, and coffees sipped almost therapeutically, as a means of estrangement from everyday life. “Sono qui con te sempre più solo”, “La ricostruzione del Mocambo”, and, later on, “Gli impermeabili” and “La nostalgia del Mocambo” make up a tetralogy of songs that, for more than one reason, can be taken as a metaphor for Conte's entire body of work, as well as a highly significant episode in Italian song at large.

“La ricostruzione del Mocambo” is also one of the standout tracks on his second album, Paolo Conte (Rca, 1975), a record that marks his definitive break from writing songs for other performers, finally arriving at a collection of tracks destined to be remembered as his first classics. It's precisely this second chapter of the Mocambo saga that surprises with its newly rediscovered jazzy streak (held in check until then), a horn line unspooling à la Nino Rota and the drowsy vocalizing of the female chorus that magnificently sets up the verse. “Genova per noi”, the last reworking of one of his earlier songs, becomes a little bolero-march embellished with capricious piano digressions, but also with an arrangement that grows gradually richer with precious shadings (even dissonant ones), and “La Topolino amaranto”, the very first song Conte wrote four-handed with his brother (never dusted off before then), is a stride piece à la Luckey Roberts spiced up by a contrasting accordion mimicking a folk-popular melody.

On Un gelato al limon, the closing chapter of his first period, his autobiographism is already wavering, often giving way to open-faced interjections, to portraits that are more metaphorical, symbolic and impressionistic; the arrangements are lusher, the sound fuller (featuring Pfm), yet what stands out are the pointed jive numbers (“Bartali”, a salacious hymn to his favorite sport) and the dragging tangos (“Rebus”, “Un gelato al limone”). The result is a questionable compromise between transition and the consolidation of a casual style, but with an underlying averageness that tries too hard not to be mere conformism.

This trilogy of works would be followed by another, marked by a stylistic openness that would establish its absolute artistic value and distinctiveness, and by a desire to speak openly to the listener of tiny images, sensations, emotions, smells, scents, encounters and clashes between mocking or sardonic characters, mythical ideals and symbolic cycles. Autobiographism definitively gives way to the disenchanted man and his riddles, to the melancholy of a life still in the making, to regrets and remembrances. His stylistic range widens considerably, reaching into genuinely malleable clusters of effective ideas and inexhaustible imagination. His songs thus become true musical occasions capable of hosting Latin American dances (tango, habanera, fandango, paso doble, jive, cha cha, rumba), piano-and-voice pieces of aching melancholy (often enriched with solo passages) and broad melodic openings (seen above all as a strong counterpart to the lyrics), and of fusing every kind of stylistic instance into unusual, elegant forms, detached yet equally heartfelt. Above all, his inclination toward jazz and swing numbers, influenced by Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, expresses itself in all its oblique, detached elegance, helping to place his lyrics (laden with ellipses, wordplay, synaesthesia) on an even higher plane of anti-grandiloquent emotional honesty.

The new lineups of his backing bands consistently move in this direction, positioning themselves somewhere between a jazz ensemble and a big band, and constantly showing fresh powers of invention.

The first fruit of this Conte-esque “consistent deviation” is Paris Milonga (Rca, 1981). Thus, in the opening track, “Alle prese con una verde Milonga” (one of his masterpieces), through the sly slowness, the melodious half-spoken delivery of Conte's voice (noticeably lowered in pitch compared to “Gelato”), and the bolero/blues/flamenco carried forward by harmonic sorcerers, a will toward an exhausting yet oblique, insistent cross-pollination becomes crystal clear. Throughout the record, Conte distributes the core traits of his repertoire with measured balance: touching piano-and-voice ballads (“Blue Haway”, “Parigi”, “Un'altra vita”), swinging sketches with madrigal-like flourishes and guitar counterpoints straight out of a vintage TV ad (“L'ultima donna”, a kind of answer to Brassens's “La Première Fille”), free-verse vaudeville numbers (“Via con me”, “Madeleine”), big-band pieces with a strong improvisational component (“Boogie”), even irresistible neo-standards (“Pretend Pretend Pretend”). It's a skillfully jazzy album, almost announcing an urgency after so much creative repression, one whose importance is perhaps as much theoretical (illustrating the possibilities of the song form at the dawn of this new creative period) as practical: rarely would Conte again reach these heights of sheer, easy enjoyment, and it stands as the best possible starting point for a sound that is philologically Conte's own.

If Paris Milonga cemented Conte's breakthrough as a unique figure on the Italian scene, while still being somewhat uneven in its overall polish, the following Appunti di viaggio (Rca, 1982) moves briskly toward defining the album as a song cycle, as an unassailable whole. In what is perhaps a unique case within Paolo Conte's discography, it's a scruffy, roguish work that channels superb instrumental and poetic abilities into vital, highly evocative sketches, often lacking a beginning or an end, possessing instead only their own autonomy, aware of being clipped shreds of everyday irony, details from vignettes magnified and wrenched from their original context. Already in the splendid opening of “Fuga all'Inglese”, with a kind of sampling (almost anticipating lo-fi) of a Gershwin-esque piece, Conte's purest aesthetic emerges: the recovery of the castoffs of the past, their reintegration as a vehicle for temporal transfiguration and, at the same time, for inventive joy.

With “Dancing” we're catapulted into a cunning rumba, backed by electric piano and a Memphis-style mini-orchestra, while “Lo Zio” is a Buscaglionesque number that lays out swing guitar charges before an awkward cymbal-crash close, and “Diavolo rosso” is an extraordinary chamber foxtrot with pulsing synths and a driving rhythm section. “Gioco d’azzardo” and – to a lesser extent – “La frase” are highly valuable supporting pieces within the album's economy: once again, brilliantly constructed, almost ad libitum continuous cycles, with ballroom rhythms, ecstatic yet restless synths, and bop-style improvisational sections led by alto sax.

“Hemingway”, the brightest star of his output and his melodic masterpiece, is a codification of the song format organized around a choral, emotional crescendo that starts from Conte's muted languor and builds to a grand instrumental opening for horns and keyboards, triggered by the piano alone. “Nord” closes the album the way “Wreck On The Highway” closed Springsteen's “The River”. A nostalgic void, marked by confessional, diary-like tones, pushes through in verses of the sweetest nursery-rhyme simplicity, only to rise into an aerial view with a melancholy theme nonetheless soothed by a bittersweet full-orchestra jam. Here Conte is truly at his formal and substantive peak, fully aware of his artistic potential (also thanks to an ever-greater ease with genres and “external” borrowings), making a statement of intent that doesn't limit itself to a mere program of manipulating song form, but shrewdly probes instrumental zones and narrative planes, emotional engagement and the detachment of a narrator devoted to a disarming yet highly evocative essentialism.

With Paolo Conte (Cgd, 1984), the fusion of the two previous creative strands (the classicism of Paris Milonga and the global reach of Appunti) reaches perfect fulfillment. It is, at once, his most anguished and meditated record, his own “Tonight’s The Night”, the most brooding and almost self-pitying Conte, and also an expressive turning point destined to become, for new generations, a cardinal point of the singer-songwriter tradition to come. On one hand there are memorable songs like “Gli impermeabili”, the continuation and peak of Conte's melodic standard as well as the third chapter of the Mocambo tetralogy (a sort of serene funeral for defeated aspirations sung by airy strings), “Come mi vuoi?”, an anti-romantic serenade for piano and sax, or again “Come – di”, an irresistible Calloway-style swing. On the other hand there's the unifying theme of the ape-man (in Black communities, the jazz dancer), unraveled through learned citations-metaphors of a character reduced to a kind of emotional drift. At the heart of the record comes “Sotto le stelle del jazz”, perhaps his definitive masterpiece, a brilliant and poetic blend of intimate, confiding, lyrical and enigmatic atmospheres, with gospel, blues, honky tonk and brass band accents, a collection of legendary motets (set to wonderfully original and moving lyrics), of nocturnal images created by the night itself, a diary of blues sighs and dreamy nostalgia.

Rounding things off are the instrumental “The Music – All?”, a sorrowful sonnet for piano and vibraphone, almost his own personal take on Chopin's “Nocturnes”, the ballad “Chiunque”, with another piano-and-sax duet sharing out heartfelt, undefined sorrows over a progression of noble, taciturn chords, and the futuristic piece “Simpati – Simpatia”, with the sequencer prominently on display, adding connective patterns to the ever-present piano.

An apotheosis of Conte the singer, pianist, and thoroughly Italian maudit poet of a soul deeply marked by small sufferings, this is a subliminal record made up of pieces that thrive on their own lean, austere, uncontaminated mixtures. Where jazz mainly serves to build emotional scaffolding, the author tames instruments and orchestrations into a mood transfigured into solemn invective, introspective prayer. “Come mi vuoi?” was supposed to be part of Patty Pravo's “Occulte persuasioni” (Cgd, 1984), but was left off it; the songwriter did, however, work on that album under the pseudonym “Solingo”.

Warmly received by critics, the record also launches Conte onto the international scene. Intense live activity follows, keeping him busy in Italy as much as (and perhaps more than) in France – the very France that had inspired him at the start of his career. Concerts (Cgd, 1985), featuring live recordings of these song-form feats, fittingly immortalizes this period.

Riding the wave of renewed interest in him, Conte releases his most ambitious work, one of the rare double albums in Italian music, Aguaplano (Cgd, 1986). In truth, it's the typical transitional work, in which the author reaps what he has sown and, using the same ingredients, reaffirms his aesthetic while taking stock of where he stands. The double-vinyl format helps him realize his most pressing ambitions, but even Conte can't entirely escape the risk of encyclopedism that so often comes with such projects. Still, the strengthening of his standards is convincing. There are, for instance, the by-now-classic melodic openings: the title track, with its broad Bolivian theme sung by choir and orchestra, or “Max”, another of his strong pieces, an agogic crescendo with a two-part motif à la Ravel's Bolero. “Paso Doble” is a piano-and-voice cabaret-jazz gag, almost self-mocking, with a brilliant alternation between a darkened verse and an accelerated chorus with repeated notes in a major key, and “Nessuno mi ama” opens with a sensual theme for piano, sax and double bass, before soaring into an Ellington-esque swing with the entrance of a female choir.

The Neapolitan excursion of “Spassiunatamente”, the cool-song “Anni”, the ternary time of “Hesitation”, adorned with madrigal-like figures set up by the left hand's piano play, the odd-time divertissement “La Negra”, the good-natured piano waltz parodying the belle époque in “Non Sense”, the rhyming ballad “Gratis”, the danse macabre led by the jambé of “Les Tam-Tam du Paradis”, the onomatopoeic, polyglot piece of the absurd “Ratafià” – these are all episodes of fine-tuning and forward-looking. More a litmus test, a creative experiment, than a deeply felt work, Aguaplano is the album of half-truths: Conte indulges himself here, but above all takes stock; it doesn't thrill, it theorizes.

Another live album, Paolo Conte Live (Cgd, 1988), shows that this period is focused more on researching and reworking his own themes than on genuine new creation.

With the diptych Parole d’Amore Scritte a Macchina and 1900, a new period of fertility begins for the songwriter. With the great run of concert-going behind him, Conte devotes himself more to his own inner personality, to everyday emotions, above all giving voice to an impulse rooted in his deepest lived experience. Having already explored experiences directly shared with a human counterpart (“Lo Zio”, “Fuga all’inglese”, “Come mi vuoi?”) or with a mythological one (“Alle prese con una verde Milonga”, “L’ultima donna”, “Sotto le stelle del jazz”, “Diavolo rosso”), Conte now settles his poetic concerns on narratives and confessions that stem chiefly from his own dreaming, processing, restlessly light-footed self.

The first, Parole d’Amore Scritte a Macchina (Cgd, 1990), is the most anomalous work of his career, marking a further stylistic turn bordering on experimentalism. It's also his first album to focus on atmosphere – never so bare, fearless, enigmatic and, at the same time, lopsided and barely sketched-out – and on unusual, anachronistic constructions. The overture, “Dragon”, is worthy of standing alongside “Alle prese con una verde Milonga”: an estranging, “railway” boogie-blues, driven by an overdubbed sequencer and trance-like guitars, with voodoo-style choruses and vocalizing, fractured between muted trombone outbursts, clarinet contortions, arcane double-bass flourishes and a brief yet obscure spoken passage from Conte. “Il Maestro” is nothing less than an epic Verdi-esque hymn sung by a female choir, echoed by Conte with his usual knack for oblique variation, paying tribute to part of his own artistic influences. “La canoa di mezzanotte”, the most experimental episode of his career, is a duet (with Sybil Mostert on second vocals) built almost entirely on synth and sequencer, and “Ma si t’a vo’ scurda’” is another Neapolitan-flavored piece.

In “Ho ballato di tutto” a proud Beethovenian sonata-like riff preludes a sordid outburst of glittering string pizzicatos and martial guitar strumming, along with abstract intersections of orchestral arabesques in contrapuntal dissonance. “Un vecchio errore” is a swarm of sub-codes (classicism and ballad accompaniment, confessional candor, resignation and stubbornness) that lays out a new piano-and-voice piece (and one of his best). Finally, “Mister Jive” once again calls on the choir to paint a nostalgic tribute to Harry Gibson and the “Cotton Club”, the historic temple of jive music, with decadent crooning and a compassionate sadness running through the verse-chorus alternation. It's a bewitching album that shuns all programmatic rhetoric to become fatalistic to the point of excess. Conte's voice – theatrical, “soul”, and more impertinent than ever – shows off grammelot, linguistic borrowings, hermeticism and theatrical flair. The cover was designed by Hugo Pratt.

The second part, 1900 (Cgd, 1992), while keeping the same nostalgic streak constant, moves in the opposite direction. The album's focus is the maximalist (orchestral) fusion of the most diverse styles and genres, always brought back to the artistic mood of the turn of the century, or the passage between two eras. “Gong-Oh”, the most philologically faithful of the bunch, is an Art Tatum-style tribute dedicated to Chick Webb and Sidney Bechet. The title track is another dazzling prelude, a symphonic opening with Waller-esque piano trills, a waltz theme, and a Belle Époque atmosphere straight out of the fin de siècle, in keeping with the orchestration's procession of storytellers and acrobats. The cloud of synths in “Il treno va” and in the romance “I giardini pensili ha fatto il suo tempo” is the only echo of the experiments of Parole d’amore (here, in any case, used in a highly naturalistic sense). “Schiava del Politeama” is a sordid tango in Conte's best style, almost a self-parody, but also a caressing orchestration of accordion, string ensemble and sax solo.

The piano-and-double-bass duet of “Per quel che vale” is desolate and rarefied to the extreme, but it picks itself back up with a decadent bolero, and the big-band tropicalia of “La donna della tua vita” is a little carousel of the styles dearest to the author. “Inno in re bemolle” is a slow, refined music-hall number dominated by a mournful sax, and “Una di queste notti” offers an intro straight out of an enchanted circus and – shortly after – a beguiling samba-style acceleration, blended in the most natural way with themes and melodic ideas from a Parisian Café-Concert. In “Do do” (sung by Jino Touche, Conte's bass player) the album's usual swagger vanishes, giving way to an atmosphere that is at times sacred and intriguing, almost a final benediction.

A vantage point and crossroads, a counterpart to Adolf Angst's drive to rebuild austere climates, this is above all a container-album, albeit one of undeniable charme, setting out an elusive discourse made of elusive songs. Traditional only in a very superficial sense: the anachronistic theme is a mere pretext for explorations and deviated trajectories. Just as anomalous as the previous record (perhaps even more so). 1900 is also the album that will definitively export Conte's songwriting to those normally regarded as his disciples (Vinicio Capossela, Gianmaria Testa, Sergio Cammariere, Ivan Segreto, Carlo Fava, Don Ciccio Philarmonic Orchestra), and will lay the groundwork for his own eventual self-overcoming.

Both anachronistic, Parole d’amore and 1900 are – contrary to popular belief – two albums that are Conte-esque to the core, his ying and yang, an image and its photographic negative. Where Parole d’amore is hermetic, instrumentally eccentric, taciturn, confessional and intimate, 1900 is descriptive, orchestral, loquacious, expansive and exuberant. With this diptych, Conte finally laid bare his emotional foundations (even before his artistic ones), building a song cycle that paradoxically must be understood as a single, indivisible whole.

The music-hall flavour of "Bye, Music", the French-language ballad "Reveries" and the instrumental "Ouverture alla russa" are the three previously unreleased tracks on Tournée (Cgd, 1993), the first volume of live recordings taped between Hamburg, Paris, Valencia and Vienna.

Una faccia in prestito (Cgd, 1995) returns to a new reworking in the style of Aguaplano. As in that case, it's a wordy, pedantic record, eclectic and not without moments of real emotion, but lacking overall cohesion. It's almost as if, in these instances, Conte sets out to generate as many ideas as possible to test his own art and ward off the spectre of dried-up inspiration. "Don't Throw It In The W.C" is a demanding Armstrong-style chaconne that could stand as a metaphor for the whole record: muted trumpet leading a long, semi-orchestral introduction, conventional harmonies paired with a richly expressive arrangement, and lyrics that are sparse and of secondary importance. The veteran songwriter, in any case, still knows how to soar gloriously through dizzying rumbas like "Elisir", brash can-cans like "Sijmadicandhapajiee", mournful lullabies like "Le parole tue per me", and piano-and-voice exchanges like those of the title track. "Danson metropoli" is another swinging, slightly superfluous nonsense game, and the following "Il miglior sorriso della mia faccia" attempts to mimic his past melodic masterpieces.

Despite several attempts at rehabilitation behind him, the Conte heard on Una Faccia In Prestito is one "stripped bare", trusting more in cunning, somnambulant orchestrations (often carried by Max Pitz alone) than in flights of fancy. Pedantic songs begin to creep in, ones that would work better in the live shows of the period – not coincidentally the happiest of his career. The final seven minutes of "L'incantatrice" and the heightened dramaturgy of "Quadrille", with the seasoned Touche on second voice, are the first signs of the "Razmataz" project to come.

The Best Of (Cgd, 1996) is the finest Paolo Conte anthology released to date. The 1998 edition, produced for the American market, was released by Nonesuch.

Tournée 2 is the sequel to the album from five years earlier, and the best live album of Paolo Conte's career (featuring five previously unreleased tracks: "Swing", "Irresistible", "Nottegiorno", "Roba di Amilcare", "Legendary").

Conte has, in any case, gone well beyond his original project of illustrious revisitation of Italian song, breaking through several of its boundaries via a reinvention rooted in premises free from any generic constraint, while also paying reverent respect to his noble sources of inspiration. This compositional freedom has never produced contradictory or sterile, senile gestures; quite the opposite, it appears devoted to spontaneous continuity along poetic lines steeped in charm, a self-portrait that is openly uncompromising toward the listener of the work, and above all toward himself – an elegant, melancholic man forever gripped by gentle, impalpably deep unease. In the Felliniesque bravado of his second album, just as in the perpetual motions of Appunti di viaggio, or the stylistic dissertations of Aguaplano, just as in the jazzy vaudevilles of Paris, Milonga, the laments of the self-titled album, just as in the orchestral colourings of 1900, or the eccentric hermeticism of Parole d'amore, an unyielding personality emerges, devoted to a continual game of sober reworking and rigorous channelling, always within the bounds of rules and genuine conventions. This "double register" is, by the end of this intense creative period, one of the greatest and most miraculous lessons ever taught to Italian songwriting and to Italian music in general.

Having partly exhausted his creative vein within the song form, the artist devoted himself to realizing a work he had been secretly gestating since his very beginnings.

Razmataz, the final result of that long process, is a colossal multimedia operetta project combining illustrations and a musical score, which – on its own – represents a creative season particularly dear to the artist. The project allows Conte to move on several fronts at once: first, to rediscover himself as a composer capable of painting in the operetta form, tackling arias as well as overtures, interludes and grand orchestral set-pieces. Secondly, it's an unmissable chance to finally lay bare his innate passion for painting and art history, both by producing concrete results in the form of drawings and plates, and by thematically focusing on the artistic and pictorial avant-gardes of the early 20th century (surrealism and Dadaism above all, though Conte's pictorial style is closer to early Carlo Carrà). At the same time, the whole project lets Conte explore once again his great gift for blending disparate elements, thanks to the providential sense of discretion that has always marked his songs.

The result is a work that is at the very least significant, even if destined to be forgotten quickly (certainly not to repeat the worldwide success of its contemporary, Riccardo Cocciante's "Notre-Dame de Paris"), released in Italian, English, French and Spanish versions, unfolding across around a hundred plates (charcoal sketches, temperas, drawings, etc.) and more than two hours of audio-video synchronisation, telling a deliberately imprecise story.

The narrative pretext is that of an African dancer named Razmataz, her chase after success in the great and beautiful Paris, and her swift, mysterious disappearance; along the way, encounters with crooked talent scouts, street performers, show-business friends riding high on success, and other mythological figures of obscure meaning send the story soaring toward the status of a universal parade through the world of art – understood by Conte as an austere, elusive form of creativity – and toward a deep reflection on the atmosphere of supreme cultural contamination of the early 20th century, amid pictorial experimentation, early jazz, African culture, operatic classicism, and the poetics of the city's underbelly.

Technically, the work is experienced live through the multiple, synchronised projection of images across several rooms, arranged as an audiovisual exhibition route, alongside the listening of the musical score. In the earliest stagings of the "Razmataz Tour", held throughout 2001 in Cannes (its international premiere at the Mostra del Cinema), London and Berlin, and only later in Italy, the show included a live performance by a symphonic band-orchestra, functioning much like an operatic prelude, an introduction delivered by an off-screen narrating voice, and the unfolding of the story itself through curtains and transitions between pictorial works. The visual component interacted first and foremost with itself, mimicking dialogue and solo parts, and then – again in sync – with the (pre-recorded) musical score, which alternately served as instrumental interlude, pure backing accompaniment, or a genuine leading character in its own right, almost overtaking the visual power of the characters invented and drawn by the artist.

The vocal pieces feature performers ranging from Conte himself to lyric sopranos, chanteuses with a timbre à la Edith Piaf, Waits-esque crooners, and African-American performers. In keeping with the premises of this "pictorial musical", the compositions blend heterogeneous elements drawn in equal measure from tradition, opera, and his own personal repertoire.

A project built on anachronism and nostalgic rhetoric, ambition and the refined pretensions of a provincial universalism, a wandering non-conformity. It has the classic surreal charm of Magritte's boulders floating in mid-air, so unnatural in their spontaneous temporal displacement that even careful observation becomes a kind of mechanical, meticulous nonsense. It's for this reason that its predictable flop would seal its fate. A targeted synthesis (to be breathed in deeply, rather than simply watched or heard) of Conte's aesthetic tout court. The soundtrack, released on Cgd East West in 2001 and featuring only a handful of – rearranged – highlights from the original performances, offers a lukewarm, if pleasant, reward. A compositional occasion drawn from the novel of the same name, written by Conte himself.

Reveries (2003) is another release aimed at the American market (though it soon spread to Europe too), containing the previously unreleased studio version of the title track (until then known only in its live form), alongside tired rerecordings of a few classics ("Dancing", "Fuga all'Inglese", "Come Mi Vuoi?", "Madeleine") and original tracks drawn from 1900 and Aguaplano.

Nine years after his last album of songs, Conte returns with his most nocturnal and disillusioned work, Elegia (Warner, 2004). The title track opens with a solitary piano, with noble Chopin-esque flourishes; "Chissà" is an atmospheric ballad built on deep piano tolls and understated counterpoints, and "Molto Lontano" is a ternary dance with a tempo change in the chorus that becomes a (re)change of atmosphere. "Non Ridere" (his own exclusive, heartfelt j'accuse), "Sandwich Man" (a piano-driven calypso with impressionistic lyrics), "Bamboolah" (a small but effective exercise in stylization) and "Il Regno del Tango" (an emotional stylistic blend in bossa tempo) are tracks through which the bard of Asti vents once again via colouristic inventions that had perhaps remained in the shadows on records like the previous one.

The fourth episode of the saga of the man from Mocambo ("La Nostalgia del Mocambo") fits perfectly into the mood of the record: an ecstatic oasis of caressed piano notes set against and contrasted with a lean chorus, as the protagonist sets aside even his last faint hopes and surrenders once and for all (but serenely) to the "tinello marón" in the company of his inevitable partner, sipping the equally inevitable coffee.

A raw record devoid of any rhetorical effects beyond those that sum up a poetics, Elegia, despite a certain lack of sketch-like immediacy, allows Conte to wield the magic wand of mood-switching and inner feeling, borrowed from a traveller on his way home, wrapped in the thousand thoughts of the return. Heavy use is made of Claudio Chiara (playing flute, alto and tenor sax, and double bass). The singer-songwriter's first album for Atlantic.

After 37 years, Paolo Conte returned to writing for Adriano Celentano. The song, "L'indiano", is part of the soundtrack to the TV broadcast "Rockpolitik", aired on RaiUno in October 2005.

In late 2005 Paolo Conte Live Arena di Verona was released, a double live album (with accompanying DVD) containing the entire performance of the July 26th concert, perhaps the most representative of the 2005 tour. It also features another previously unreleased track, titled "Cuanta Pasiòn", featuring guitarist Mario Reyes (Gypsy Kings Family) and Iberian singer Carmen Amor.

Wonderful (Bmg, 2006) is a superfluous three-CD box set covering, as elegantly as it is clumsily, Conte's entire output for Rca (the first two self-titled albums, Un gelato al limon, Paris Milonga and Appunti di viaggio), and includes the rare French-language track "Le Chic Et Le Charm", originally written for a film soundtrack.

In 2007 Rai commissioned him to compose the theme tune for the new edition of the Giro d'Italy. Conte responded with "Velocità silenziosa", the first ode to the bicycle since "Diavolo rosso".

2008 saw Conte's return on multiple fronts, confirming the renewed enthusiasm following "Razmataz" (one of the most important Italian works of all time), both as a performer and as a songwriter. Paolo Conte Plays Jazz (Sony, 2008) appeared, a collection of swing standards exhuming the very earliest days of the young Conte as an improviser (including the EP "The Italian Way to Swing" from '62 in its entirety). Last but not least, a new record deal with Universal also arrived.

The first fruit of this partnership, Psiche (Platinum / Universal, 2008), repeats the move made on Elegia: reflecting on his dearest themes through a murky revisiting that sounds like a summation of his earlier work. Touches of his old class appear in "Big Bill" and "Silver Fox", while new self-tributes bring in the Brazilian-tinged "Danza della vanità", the soul-gospel of "Il quadrato e il cerchio", the tribute to Capossela in "Ludmilla", and the drum machine of "Omicron". The lavish use of synths and the usual marriage of elegance and everyday life cannot hide a weary nostalgia, perhaps the real novelty here; his voice is deeper than ever, but also tinged with a saddening senility.

Blue Swing – Greatest Hits (Sony, 2008) is yet another compilation (on double CD), this time more essential than Wonderful.

In June 2009, nearly ten years after Razmataz, Conte returned to multimedia art. This time he collaborated with young video artist Valerio Berruti (a fellow Piedmontese), on the occasion of the 53rd Venice Art Biennale, creating the soundtrack for the animated medium-length film (shown at the Italian Pavilion) "La figlia di Isacco" (2009), a long piece for piano, violin and sax.

Just two years after Psiche, the bard once again charges forward with vaudeville, onomatopoeia and linguistic borrowings on Nelson (Universal, 2010), a stereotype of a record that nonetheless - for better or worse - manages to sound infectious on "L'orchestrina", and which - aside from pianistic elegies, Afro-Cuban dances and awkward new electronic experiments - includes the latest link in the chain of his melodic gems, "Clown", and especially the collage experiments of voices and macabre percussion on "Sotto la luna bruna". It's a record for those who settle for less, a collection that at its best counterpoints with great pomp, or indulges itself with grace; the 1900 of his new phase. His first record since the death of longtime producer Renzo Fantini, to whom it is dedicated.

In the years that followed, Conte admitted to a new dry spell in his creative vein. As with Aguaplano and Una faccia in prestito, the songwriter responded with an album boasting a long tracklist. Snob (Universal, 2014) is thus another retreat that above all betrays a lack of cohesion as it tries to reassure old and new fans alike. Amid the many clichés, from gloomy piano-and-voice set pieces to recurring South American excursions, and even explicit self-quotations, a few memorable moments do slip through, such as the new, sumptuous overture of "Si sposa l'Africa" and the new solitary anthem "Tutti a casa". Conte is by now the storyteller who recalls a storyteller who does nothing but remember.

Since the late '90s, Conte has developed, as is typical of him, in great secrecy, a parallel career as a composer for hire, from orchestrations for theatrical pieces to scores for various projects. Amazing Game – Instrumental Music (Decca, 2016) is thus his first anthology of purely instrumental music from his career. Listening to it answers a question: how does Conte behave when composing outside his legendary poetic verses? As ever, the composer strolls like an elegant, absent-minded tightrope walker across a line stretched between genres and eras. Standouts include "Pomeriggio zenzero", a Nino Rota-esque theme in mazurka time, and "F.F.F.F.", his sole foray into chamber dissonance and nearly atonal free-form composition, another of his manifestos (this time without words).

Aside from tracks that are little more than sketches for songs that never were, Conte reveals a thoroughly Western, classicizing sensibility, from the woodwind fanfares of "Song In D Flat", to the throbbing trombones of "À La Provençale", heartfelt melodies worthy of a Romantic composer, to the hymn-like "Sirat Al Bunduqiyyah" and "Zinia", and even a "fugato" such as "Fuga nell'Amazzonia in re minore", a dialogue for piano and bandoneon full of harmonic and dynamic shifts. With words thus stripped away, along with the love of jazz and South American dances, what remains to be appreciated is a passionate, gentle hand, at times even charged with a melancholy that finds an almost direct precedent in Razmataz.

In the wake of this collection, the singer-songwriter writes "Black Rhino" (2016), another instrumental (this time dedicated to childhood and ecology).

In 2017, the University of Pavia awarded Conte his third honorary degree.

Zazzarazàz (2017) is an anthological box set, available in four- or eight-CD versions, featuring the previously unreleased "Per te" and a photo book. Another unreleased track, "Lavavetri", appears on Live in Caracalla (2018).

Via con me (2020) is a biographical documentary directed by Giorgio Verdelli, presented as a special event at the 77th Venice International Film Festival.

Live at Venaria Reale (2021), recorded with a chamber ensemble alongside his trusty jazz collaborators, gives the usual selection of past glories a neoclassical dress (and another unreleased track: "El Greco"). Rather inessential, aside from the usual husky elegance.

Daniele Di Gregorio, Conte's longtime drummer and percussionist, makes his solo debut with Atollo (2022), an album of impressionistic avant-garde music divided between marimba, the horns of the Vienna Symphonic Library and the Petrof Grand Piano.

On 19 February 2023, Conte performed at Teatro alla Scala: he is the first Italian singer-songwriter to perform in that temple of opera. Another prestigious milestone came with "Nostalgia for a golf, un dolcissimo golf di lana blu" (2023), an exhibition of his paintings and drawings at the Uffizi Galleries.

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