Ivano Fossati

Camellia sinensis is the tea plant, cultivated mainly in the tropical and subtropical regions of the planet. Made up of leaves whose shoots hold the essence of the historic beverage, the age of those leaves proves crucial in guaranteeing the variety of flavors, the very diversity we've known since antiquity. Ripening thus plays a key role in the harvest, as do the various treatments that follow it. Well, it's precisely in this particular natural process that Ivano Fossati finds one of the many metaphorical hooks contained in "La pianta del tè", the tenth album of a brilliant career, among the most intense, prolific and versatile in Italian singer-songwriter music.

In 1988, the Genoese singer-songwriter's human and artistic journey reaches its farthest destination. His love for world music soars to sun-drenched heights, while the musician's sensibility expands almost beyond belief, reaching the most remote corners of the planet and of a formidable critical conscience, capable of probing entire layers of society as well as caressing the human soul with a personal, far-sighted and all-encompassing vision of things. An album that marks the start of the golden era of his artistic career. But above all, the definitive confirmation of Fossati as a cultured author and a musician of the highest order. The clearest proof of how far he'd moved from the rougher edges of his early work is the comparison between "La costruzione di un amore" in its tangled, tormented original version and the crystalline, flawless one found on this masterpiece — an album that is, on the whole, perfect in its orchestration, alternating original, cultured ethnic touches steeped in oriental spice with more classically Western compositions, all sustained by inspiration in a state of grace and an almost obsessive attention to detail. More than enough to make up for the occasional excessive hermeticism of the lyrics, a trait that has always recurred, and always will, throughout his songbook.

A masterpiece within the masterpiece is precisely the opening title track, "La pianta del tè" (parts I and II), whose nocturnal, lunar, mysterious charm comes from the contrast between the velvety Andean cane flutes and the insistent, unsettling yet never intrusive percussion. The first part is already stunning, but the second reaches spine-tingling heights, with Una Ramos's flutes unleashing their full magical power, truly transporting the listener to the top of some Chilean or Peruvian peak. "La volpe" shares a similarly nocturnal atmosphere, a dark nursery rhyme in which even Teresa De Sio's trademark bleating vocal doesn't feel out of place, used here as a fitting counter-melody to Fossati's dry voice. It's the most exotic track of the bunch, and certainly among the most Mediterranean.

"L'uomo coi capelli da ragazzo" is instead a moment of deep melancholy, where the atmosphere of loneliness and illness is conveyed through the extreme tension created by an insistently humming bass and the relentless repetition of a keyboard note at fixed intervals: a "dripping-water effect" that blankets the entire track, while the words point to routes that cannot be charted, in what amounts to "nothing more" than the expansive nihilism of a man looking at time with composure and a resignation that has finally settled in:

Here memory is not a man

And most of the time not even a woman

Here it's time that sits

Lining up the numbers in a column

Not to chart a course

Since no path can be given

When a sharp pain is followed

By an even sharper fantasy

The man will be forty years old

And the boyish haircut

In his room there's a portrait that

He's a self-made man

An awareness that clashes with the eternal melancholy reflected in a gaze that, for the occasion, repeatedly looks beyond the horizon, searching for new oases of the self, new inner escapes. The cover photo, placed over an old geographical map, is the ideal visual frame for an album that celebrates travel, both physical and figurative, as a redemptive act to be undertaken. Fossati holds his own compass and knows perfectly well how to read it. He knows the storms of his own heart and the winds that stir his path. A dreamlike trip, whose logbook is rich with suggestion.

"Questi posti davanti al mare" is built on an elementary melody, yet it's opened and closed by a ringing fanfare of keyboards; it has a rhythm that's complex but irresistible (hard to keep your hands still), and, as if that weren't enough, it's dignified by the participation of Fabrizio De André and Francesco De Gregori. Fossati's other guiding spirit, namely Paolo Conte, doesn't appear in person, but is more than evoked in a delightful little tableau in the French style, "Le signore del Ponte-Lance", for piano and voice, worthy of certain similar compositions by the lawyer from Asti.

There's always some fine touch that makes the songs unmistakable: that's true of "Terra dove andare", with its bold pairing of accordion and reggae rhythm, and of "Chi guarda Genova", whose elaborate rhythm, again Caribbean-inspired, is also punctuated by an unusual flute alongside the usual drums. In both cases the result is not only extremely original but also thoroughly pleasant. The brief closing track, "Caffè lontano", also deserves a mention of its own: the limpid sound of the Celtic harp played by Vincenzo Zitello softens the somewhat plaintive vocal. Among other things, it contains an illuminating line worthy of Paolo Conte: "I londinesi sono ombrelli in pena contro il vento".

Brilliant, like the whole record. "La pianta del tè" is indeed a memorable album, an epochal turning point in a refined musical exploration and one of the most thrilling bodies of songwriting in Italy. Its atmospheres, contaminated by the most distant fascinations, can be found in only a few other records, some of them rarely mentioned, like Mango's "Sirtaki" from 1990, and others practically unknown, like Paolo Modugno's hidden masterpiece "Brise D'Automne", also released in 1988, a year of grace not only for good old Fossati but for Italian music as a whole.

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23/06/2019