MAX GAZZÈ - L’ornamento delle cose secondarie

Max Gazzè could have celebrated thirty years of his career with a compilation, a couple of unreleased tracks, a tidy retrospective of his own history. Instead, he chose the opposite path: "L’ornamento delle cose secondarie" is not a celebratory record but a new, sprawling, disorienting work, built as if the time elapsed since his debut "Contro un’onda del mare" had mainly served to go back and finish what had been left hanging. Back in 1996, that first album struck none other than Franco Battiato, who wanted Gazzè to open his concerts. It was no minor detail: it was a record very much of its time, raw and cutting, running through a rough alt-rock sound already grafted with oblique, meticulous, at times hermetic lyrics. Beneath its apparent lightness lurked an artist out of step with the Italian songwriting of the period, one able to treat words as rhythmic, sonic matter. Thirty years on, that same inclination returns to the center, but with a different kind of awareness.

Those who only know Gazzè through "Una musica può fare", "Vento d’estate" and other popular hits, or his appearances at Sanremo, only grasp the most immediate surface of him. Gazzè has always been a flamboyant, refined bassist, a craftsman of sound, an artist able to move between wording, rhythm and arrangement with the natural ease of a showman. Even in his moments of greatest mainstream exposure, he has kept following a personal path, resistant to the automatisms of current taste. After "The mathematics of branches", a few singles had hinted at different directions, especially "L’epica della guerra", closer in density and civic tension to this new phase. But "L’ornamento delle cose secondarie" pushes that departure much further, turning it into an articulate, complex work, almost stubbornly out of format.

Twenty tracks, about an hour of music, no lead single designed to pull people in, restrained promotion, real instruments, no virtual shortcuts, openly analogue recordings, microphones, tapes, resonances, imperfections left to live. Gazzè has called it a slow record: more than an indication of pace, it's a methodological choice, tied to the recovery of dormant material — lyrics, notes, cassette tapes, ideas resurfacing from drawers and hard drives — and to a kind of listening that demands availability, concentration, return visits. In an age when music often gets reduced to a fragment, a platform-ready track, a hook to catch within the first few seconds, the title becomes the record's true manifesto: paying attention to what stays on the margins, to what doesn't ask to be noticed and for that very reason risks disappearing.

Many of the lyrics come from the writing of his brother Francesco, a key presence throughout Gazzè's artistic history, and become living cores around which Max builds his own sonic clothing. This is where the record ideally rediscovers the method of his early days: a song conceived as an organism able to grow around language, around its resonances, its exceptions. That's also why the structures expand, veer off, breathe in less predictable ways. At times a progressive sensibility emerges in compressed, anomalous form: odd time signatures, shifts in pace, contrapuntal interlocking and contaminations between classical writing and modern language, all condensed into often very short songs. It's a prog that's more cerebral than muscular, tied to freedom of form rather than the display of virtuosity: one of the project's strongest peculiarities, especially on first listen.

One of the most debated points concerns the 432 Hz tuning, different from the now more widespread standard of 440 Hz. Around this frequency there has long been a heated debate, made up of technical arguments, perceptual suggestions and at times esoteric readings. The risk would be turning it into the album's fetish; Gazzè, however, brings it back down to earth, explaining it in terms of resonance, decay, harmonic body. What matters less is establishing whether 432 Hz is truly some higher sonic truth; what matters more is observing how here it becomes part of the arrangement, consistent with a record entirely played and conceived to give music back its physical substance.

This is also why the list of instruments involved is almost boundless: horns, strings, accordion, percussion, marimba, glockenspiel, tubular bells, ukulele, Mellotron, Moog synthesizers, Hammond organ, theremin, oud, ngoni, duduk, udu, alongside bass, guitars, drums, piano and the so-called Sintofono, devised by Gazzè himself. It might look like an excessive list, but it says a great deal about the record's ambition: every timbre claims a body, a gesture, a presence. The same care carries through to the cover and the beautiful graphic design by Paolo De Francesco, an integral part of a suspended, almost submerged imagery.

Around the score imagined by Gazzè moves a cast of musicians: South Korean pianist Sun Hee You, already by his side on “Alchemaya”; longtime drummer Piero Monterisi; trusted multi-instrumentalist Max Dedo; Adriano Viterbini on guitars. This is another way the album's collective nature comes through: a strongly authorial vision, realized through different hands, breaths and sensibilities.

It would be wrong, though, to read all this as a rejection of the present. Gazzè doesn't pit analogue against digital on principle: he draws a distinction between the instrument and the creative process, and acknowledges value in any musical form capable of carrying emotion. “L’ornamento delle cose secondarie” is born instead as a reaction against the reduction of modernity to mere standards: sound made “correct” out of habit, compressed listening, songs conceived as immediate function.

There are no killer tracks: anyone looking for the more easygoing, instantly communicative verve of the popular Gazzè might initially feel thrown off, though each listener will be able to find their own points of entry.

The record chooses a path far from easy hooks and dominant choruses. On first approach it can even seem forbidding; then, listen after listen, it reveals an impressive amount of ideas, interlocking parts and sonic solutions that a distracted listen would miss almost entirely.

Gazzè's voice, too, stays composed and controlled, never wanting to overpower the atmosphere. The lyrics would almost deserve a discussion of their own: his brother Francesco, already mentioned, often the sole author of the words, displays an uncommon poetic class, made of ellipses, dense images, sharp synthesis, flashes of meaning rather than explicit narratives. These are verses to read and reread in the booklet, and then let work inside the music. Max serves them without domesticating them, building around those words brief architectures — the tracks rarely exceed three minutes — yet extremely dense ones.

The opener “Il contadino magro” is already a statement of method: it tells of the loss of illusions and the transformation into something more essential. The farmer becomes an inner figure, one who accepts waiting, toil and the measure of time. The music too seems to move within this idea of patient, layered work: electronics and orchestration merge into a blend that can recall the Battiato of the Nineties and 2000s, but within a more earthbound, irregular kind of songwriting. “L'eremita – parte II” picks up the thread of the track released on the debut album, without reproducing it: near-drum'n'bass percussion, progressive guitar, jazzy horns, memory and reinvention sharing the same space. It's one of the album's manifesto tracks, along with “Terra madre”, another litmus test for musical heterogeneity, melodic tension and moral depth.

The heart of the record moves between chamber-music elegance, timbral detours and restrained emotional writing. “Intermezzo bianco” lives in the dialogue between piano and violin; “Facce da vecchi” sways naturally, helped along by the ancient color of the oud.

“Amo” is one of the peaks, suspended between strings and theremin, a total and at the same time unsettling declaration; “Da piccolo” offers perhaps the most immediate point of access, while “Sorriso largo” weaves together Viterbini's guitar, Max's bass, Monterisi's cymbals and Marco Molino's vibraphone into a texture of great subtlety, moving precisely because of its distance from what we're used to hearing every day.

“Cherubini scalzi” and “La legge dell'etica” hold together timbral refinement and civic tension; the latter, born from a 1992 text by Francesco Gazzè, taps into current events through a broader moral question. “Attriti”, “La forma”, “Il matrimonio di tua figlia” and “Ali” shift the record toward the body, detachment, limits and subtraction. Then “Io, Giuda” changes pace, with a bass-drums-electric guitar construction that pushes the monologue on guilt toward an almost theatrical drive, while “Rumore”, “Sul filo – parte II”, “Fatto accaduto in estate” and “Dio” move through chaos, instability and rarefaction with ever-different solutions.

Closing the record is “L'oscurità”, syncopated and sinister, run through with pulsing synthesizers that never tip into electronic showmanship. Everything stays blended with the same aplomb that governs the whole work: even when the material grows darker, Gazzè keeps his gesture within a precise measure, avoids gratuitous effect and keeps firm control of the vision.

More than a concept album in the narrative sense, “L’ornamento delle cose secondarie” works as an album of vision: the individual tracks stand on their own, but their real weight emerges only when listened to as a whole. The complexity runs through the orchestrations, the blending of acoustic and electronic instruments, rhythmic asymmetries and intricate timbral interplay; the electronics slot naturally into the sonic fabric, evoking certain 1970s atmospheres and projecting them into the present with restraint.

Running through this construction is concrete human material: time, childhood, old age, guilt, responsibility, fragility, earth, darkness. When the gaze widens to civic tension, ethics, coexistence and our relationship with the planet, Gazzè chooses the question, the wound, the distorted image. In doing so he signs an ambitious, detailed, radical work: at almost sixty, he questions himself again with an album that takes instruments, methods and suggestions from the past and projects them into the present with a freedom more modern and fearless than many supposed novelties. And it proves that Italian song is still alive when it finds the courage not to resemble what it's asked to be.

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20/05/2026