Paolo Conte

Among the most original of Italian singer-songwriters, Paolo Conte stood out right from the start with his early songs written for other artists (among them, “Insieme a te non ci sto più” for Caterina Caselli, “Azzurro” for Adriano Celentano and “Onda su onda” for Bruno Lauzi), and then with his first three albums, especially “Paolo Conte” (1975). After these early experiences, Conte literally “moves while staying put”, setting against grotesque (yet unsparing) farces about autobiographical life and misadventures a stylistic openness devoted to symbolic cycles and small, telling images, musical opportunities for cross-contamination (jazz and South American dances), and disenchanted lyrical inventions. With “Paolo Conte” (Cgd, 1984), this shift, together with the fusion of the two previous creative paths – the classicism of “Paris Milonga” (1981) and the global outlook of “Appunti di viaggio” (1982) – reaches its perfect fulfilment. Up to this point, “Paolo Conte” is his most anguished record. On the same introspective level (quite far from the sharp, cultured provincialism of his early period), if “Paris Milonga” is devoted to the dimension of memory and “Appunti di viaggio” is devoted to surrounding experience, the 1984 “Paolo Conte” is devoted to his own soul.

First and foremost, this is an album of simply memorable songs. Leading the way is “Gli impermeabili”, the third chapter in the Mocambo saga (the most disillusioned, after “Son qui con te sempre più solo” and “La ricostruzione del Mocambo”, found respectively on his first and second albums), a continuation and dazzling peak of the Conte melodic standard inaugurated by “Hemingway”, a sort of serene funeral for defeated aspirations intoned by synths and airy strings, and carried along by a torrential soul cadence.

Then there are the ballads for piano, voice and sinuous instrumental touches: “Come mi vuoi?”, as taut an anti-romantic anthem as it is a murky love dedication, and “Chiunque”, with piano and sax sharing out undefined melancholy and taciturn chord progressions, in a noble silence of calculated pauses, closing on an almost expressionist scat outburst. “L’avance”, on the other hand, is a sinister tango made unstable by trills and piano modulations, and by vocal mutterings mimicking a trumpet.

“Come-di”, an irresistible Calloway-style swing with the linguistic-vocal tricks of Conte at his best as a performer, and “Macaco”, a tipsy jive with kazoo and trumpet raspberries, serve as its bittersweet counterpart, while the same propulsion of “Gli impermeabili” launches “Sparring Partner” towards a hugely passionate orchestral crescendo, framed by Oriental sighs.

The second fundamental dimension of the work is the unifying theme of the “monkey man” (the jazz dancer of Black communities), unspooled through learned citations and metaphors of a character reduced to a kind of emotional drift. This theme, already glimpsed here and there elsewhere on the album, reaches its point of greatest concentration halfway through the record with “Sotto le stelle del jazz”, perhaps his definitive masterpiece. As brilliant a poetic blend of intimate, confiding, lyrical and enigmatic atmospheres as it is a balancing of gospel, blues, honky tonk and brass band accents, this epoch-making track transfigures into a collection of mythic motets (set to an extraordinarily original and moving text), of nocturnal images – almost born of the night itself – into a diary of blues sighs and dreamy nostalgia.

Rounding out these two components – in effect two pillars of Italian singer-songwriter tradition contained within a single album – are the futuristic piece “Simpati – Simpatia”, with the sequencer on full display lending connective patterns to the ever-present piano, and – at the other extreme – the instrumental “The Music, All?”, a mournful sonnet for piano and vibraphone, almost his own personal take on Chopin’s “Notturni”, both of which feel almost out of place.

Meditative and brooding, even self-pitying, easily placed within the lineage of the great existentialist retreats, from “Blue” by Joni Mitchell, to “Tonight’s The Night” by Neil Young, to “Blue River” by Eric Andersen. It is, perhaps, the apotheosis of Conte the singer, pianist and thoroughly Italian maudit poet, centred on and animated by the marks of suffering in the outskirts of the soul, small and even subliminal sufferings shaped by songs that are joyful in their unadulterated cross-pollinations. Where jazz mainly serves to build emotional scaffolding, the author tames instruments and orchestration according to a mood transfigured into solemn invective, into introspective prayer.

Warmly received by critics, the record also launches Conte onto the international stage. Followed a year later by “Concerts” (Cgd, 1985), the first live album by the bard from Asti, featuring live recordings of these song-form feats that fittingly immortalize his golden age, it presages an intense run of live activity that will see him performing as much in Italy as (and perhaps more than) in France, the very France that had inspired him at the start of his career. It is also an expressive turning point destined to establish itself for new generations as a cardinal point of the Italian singer-songwriter tradition to come. “Come mi vuoi?” was meant to be part of Patty Pravo’s “Occulte persuasioni” (Cgd, 1984), but was left off it; the singer-songwriter did, however, work on that album under the pseudonym “Solingo”.

To avoid confusion with the other two same-named works, the subtitle is “Sparring Partner”.

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28/09/2008