Flavio Giurato

The reasons behind a long silence

Flavio Giurato is one of the greatest singer-songwriters in Italian music. The album under review here is, according to many, the very reason he was denied the chance to record new material for almost twenty years. But for this writer, that long absence, from 1984 to 2002 (the year of "Il manuale del Cantautore"), isn't simply the result of the poor returns Cgd got from releasing such a difficult, singular work, one bound to be misunderstood.

With "Marco Polo", Flavio Giurato had delivered, in a steady crescendo, his third masterpiece in a row. Behind him were two concept albums: "Per futili motivi" (1978) and "Il tuffatore" (1982). The latter remains his best-known and most celebrated record (as far as one can speak of fame in his case), helped also by a few appearances on Carlo Massarini's "Mister Fantasy" show, hosted by Carlo Massarini.

In short, Giurato had strung together three precious gems in a row, reaching an unsurpassable peak over the course of three albums. But his was not a peak that could settle into "maturity": his songwriting had none of the traits needed to become either a formula - something tried and tested, repeatable even without the same spark of inspiration - or a style, that is, a mode of expression with its own precise internal rules capable of setting a trend and gathering disciples.

Giurato didn't have the makings of a mentor, and he certainly had no interest in becoming one. He was, rather, a genius, illuminated by a light as powerful as it was dangerous, one he turned to look at right as it reached its zenith. A light, to be clear, of which Giurato was not merely the precious witness, the messenger, the interpreter. He knew how to surrender to it, to become part of it and give it a body. A light that blazed brightly from the top of this peak, but which ended up casting an extremely long shadow over him.

With this album, Giurato had given everything of himself, to the point where the record's character and events came to coincide not so much with the artist as with the human being, weaknesses and all. And once you've turned yourself into the "raw material" of your art and managed to sublimate yourself through such total identification, you can't simply go looking for new stories to tell, because telling "just" stories isn't what interests you.

For Giurato, having a plan isn't enough, nor is having a narrative "spark" that precedes the artistic gestation. His modus operandi is better understood as a kind of trance, an ecstasy in which that precious light is present and shapes the writing, illuminates the flashes of insight, breathes new life into the plundered historical material. Having a "project" is a necessary condition, but no longer a sufficient one, unless that guiding light is present. And this is what makes him such a singular songwriter.

The idea doesn't spring from an intellectual need: Flavio doesn't set out on this arduous journey to pursue some ambitious cultural project (which is one of the driving forces behind the linguistic journey of "Crêuza de mä", released the same year). His journey is a way, perhaps the only way, to fulfil himself, to atone for his own torment. Right up to the point of exhaustion.

The artistic arc of Flavio Giurato, which reaches its high point in "Marco Polo", could therefore admit no downward phase, no string of minor works or attempts to replicate past glories and past appearances - only a long, very long silence. A silence that lasted, in fact, eighteen years. Miracles don't repeat themselves.

The dialectic of opposites

The singularity of "Marco Polo", its unrepeatable nature, or the commercial indifference it had to face, shouldn't be traced back to the author's use of an overly complex, hermetic, impenetrable form. It isn't a work chasing the portrayal of a universe so personal that it ends up coinciding entirely with the sphere of its author's own individuality. Or, at least, not only that.

Giurato instead takes the path of grand narrative. He chooses to recount the deeds of Marco Polo. The author thus becomes an extradiegetic narrator of the story, recounting events from outside the tale itself. But in constructing the narrative and its development, in giving the story its own deeply personal tension, Giurato sets in motion what is, in effect, the driving engine of the entire album: the dialectic of opposites. He doesn't sing about Marco Polo so much as end up being acted upon by him. He doesn't narrate the deeds of the Venetian traveller but merges with them, in a play of mirrorings and reflections where one is lost in the other and the other resurfaces in the first. And Marco Polo, in being sung, ends up absorbing all the pain and humanity of a narrator who, in telling of a journey, embarks upon it himself.

In "Marco Polo" there is the broad sweep of epic, which nonetheless ends up wrapping itself - without ever fully doing so - around a deeply personal anguish that seeps through every fold and every note. We might say that without Marco Polo, without such an exemplary tale, Flavio Giurato would never have found the guidance he needed, the definitive form in which to shape his uncontrollable expressive urge.

The dialectic of opposites, this play of forces and pulls, this perilous oscillation, thus unfolds between the universality of the tale and the autobiography of its teller, finding its own magical balance. But also between past and future: the past of the song-form, understood as a formal point of reference, and its crumbling. The album contains two of the most beautiful songs, in the strictest sense, in Italian music, "I punti cardinali" and "Marco e Monica". While the pairing of "Le funi" and "Vela e mare" is among the boldest things ever attempted on a record, about as far removed from song structure as it's possible to get.

It's a record that, in being so unique and different, ends up echoing a great many other things within itself. And despite whatever innovation or avant-garde spirit it might contain, it's never a record that makes novelty its main point. You never get the sense that Giurato wants to be "stubbornly contemporary," or wants to tear the song form apart from within for destructive ends. It's a record that sounds like a classic: there's a man and there's a journey. Everything else coexists within the folds of a layering that gives the work the status of a masterpiece.

Flavio Giurato is a singer-songwriter, but is "Marco Polo" a singer-songwriter record?

A fulfillment

In the two previous albums, Flavio Giurato's aesthetic universe had already found a clear definition of its own, somewhere between an ever-burning sincerity and a good dose of brilliant invention.

It's the path that leads from the debut "Per futili motivi", with its more carnal, full-blooded attitude, in which the use of Roman dialect is a vehicle for more archaic and austere scenarios and feelings, to the second album, "Il tuffatore", where Giurato dons the guise of a latter-day Walter Chiari, "the last of the gentlemen," with the intimate satisfaction of belonging to something more beautiful and exclusive, in a romantic chronicle where romanticism turns sophisticated, melancholy becomes anguished, and the narrative soars into imaginary dimensions.

A song form that's at times theatrical, shouldering a pain and a sadness of the clearest kind. These are lyrics through which Giurato accustoms us to his insights, sometimes cutting, sometimes more measured and tender, to his often swaggering poses, to his search for a beauty that lies in the flash, in the sudden openings, like those of the tennis player who seeks fulfillment in the elegance of his gesture, the same elegance of the diver who, before the jump, "adjusts himself and prepares with uncommon beauty."

In "Marco Polo" Giurato doesn't give up his volcanic drive, his charge of elegant pathos, but he seems to yield to something mystical, a sacred calling that exerts control over him and wraps every invention in a state of necessity. A higher capacity for synthesis is thus achieved, within writing that manages to be both more measured and more extreme at once, in a record that appears more ordered and, at the same time, more subversive, forever balanced between poetic tension and narrative necessity.

If the splendor of the harmonies found in "Per futili motivi" was enriched in "Il tuffatore" by ambitious arrangements, in "Marco Polo" the musical side of things is likewise impeccable, in intensity, writing and execution. A musical discourse that manages itself to become, as we'll see, narrative substance, creating atmospheres, giving body to torment, skillfully staging changes of course, new physical and mental geographies, aided too by the support of great musicians such as Piero Tievoli, Toto Torquati and Ray Cooper.

In the vortex

"La teoria dell'orientamento" is the title of the album's first part, which opens with the sweet notes of guitar and piano on "I punti cardinali". Over them, with the same sweetness, comes Flavio's voice, repeating the same swaying notes over and over, as in a litany. Then suddenly a rupture, the first epiphanic words: "Marco Polo è un bimbo, ma non così piccino" ("Marco Polo is a child, but not that small"). It's a dazzling opening: there's the purity of the child, untouched before the world, yet already ready, already open toward the unknown, toward the journey, toward adventure.

Through the mechanism of repetition and circularity, the song unfolds a great deal of information about Marco and his childhood: his mother's death, the fabric shop, his perpetual waiting for his father's return as he listens to the fishermen's tales. The piano's steady tread accompanies Giurato's already celestial voice, while brief, feverish bursts of electric guitar punctuate it. "I punti cardinali" is a masterpiece, one of those songs capable of compressing an entire world into a handful of words.

The circularity of this first track is destined, already in "Le funi", to turn into a vortex. Marco, who had been left out of his father's voyages, can finally set sail ("per motivi di cuore", "for reasons of the heart"). Giurato repeats the same line some forty times: "Di nuovo i marinai già tirano le funi" ("Once again the sailors are already pulling the ropes"). We're at sea, the litany becomes a prayer upon the waves, and through a prodigious, intimate vocal performance it's not merely the repetition of a line, but the renewal, with every fresh utterance, with every wave and breath, of a feeling of mystical rapture and wonder. So the use of a structure as simple as it is daring isn't explained by any merely provocative intent: it's all necessary to the poetic transmutation of an emotion.

The lightning strike comes with the next track: "Vela e mare". Giurato picks up where he left off, and over the same structure as the previous song he repeats the same line again, but with a more obsessive, almost possessed, at times nervous edge. The instruments too grow "agitated": guitar, percussion, bass. It's open sea. Until a furious cry: "Terra" ("Land").

After an introduction with a harmonica that has a faintly country flavor, "La Provvidenza" begins, proceeding with a solemn, almost lofty gait, borne along by an orchestra of strings and brass, amid Giurato's typical inventions ("la provvidenza è vestita come un attore americano", "providence is dressed like an American actor") and images of vivid, powerfully symbolic colors, almost harsh in their chromatic contrast ("per te Gerusalemme è rossa di sangue e verde di olivi", "for you Jerusalem is red with blood and green with olives") up to the crescendoing finale ("e Marco Polo il vento nel culo dei cavalli vola", "and Marco Polo flies with the wind in the horses' rear") which once again restates what the destiny is: to push on toward the unknown.

"L'Oriente" brings the first part of the record to a close. It's a beautiful instrumental piece that contains within it all the souls of the album: a first section radiant with guitars fades faintly into a whispered trumpet, before veering, to the rhythm of tambourines and congas, toward a premonition with an exotic flavor, until the final section in which a voice in English reports, like a news bulletin, the stages of the journey covered, while in the background Flavio's voice, humming pleasantly, is joined by a mysterious sound like the rubbing together of marbles.

The second part of the album, “La crescita”, opens with “Nel deserto armeno”, a sorrowful place of passage, too vast not to breed anxiety. Yet it is precisely “from the Armenian desert and its fears (that) Marco draws his strength”. The strength to cross this symbolic place of growth. Four minutes of nightmares, once again a whirling succession of identical phrases (“no more ambushes, no more chases, no more wars, no more executions”) in which repetition is, once again, both a joyful vehicle for the emotions experienced in this initiatory transit, and a measure of the time that has passed (“summer passes, and autumn passes, and winter passes, and the spring nights pass”).

“Il Gran Khan” begins, like other songs on the album, in a measured way, with a couple of lines of lyrics that serve the needs of a narrative turning point (as also happens in “Le funi” and “Nel deserto armeno”), where literature and song cross-pollinate, in a mutual kinship that is another cornerstone of the album. A pounding, steady drumbeat then opens us up to the pathos of the great encounter, the one with the legendary emperor of China.

With “Marco e Monica”, Giurato signs one of the most beautiful love songs ever written.

The love for his beloved is the same feeling Marco has for his city, Venice. It's the love of one who has lived through ecstasy and torment and can finally return home, a love so pure because it is a landing, the sweetest one, because it is the landing place of someone who has already landed everywhere and who, after having seen everything and met everyone, desires nothing more than to make the ending coincide with the exact point where it all began. Rain, the push of the river, the shelter of a cave, the lake, the softness of the mountain, the tree in the woods, the weight of the branches. The elements, primal and pulsing forces, take part in building a scenario in which the most carnal of actions is sublimated into the sweetest lyricism, in which love is consumed on earth while simultaneously projecting itself beyond the wall, toward the stars. Rarely has a song managed to make of a sexual act both the most concrete of actions and the most magical of abstractions. Amid biblical and ancestral echoes (“willed by the rain, pushed by the river, and sheltered by a cave”), the description — even a shameless one — of the act (“and with the same erection, the two young lovers change position”), backed by nothing more than a simple guitar accompaniment and little else for color (harmonica and trumpet throughout), Flavio reaches the peak of his art.

The closing “Marco Polo” seals the entire story:

Marco Polo left behind in Venice a society whose music was founded on faith

The faith that one plus one equals two

In the East the Great Khan will tell him that the arrow is different from the bow

And that the target is always moving

Ladies and gentlemen

Marco Polo

These lines, recited in various languages, dizzyingly sum up the whole epic that has been lived and told, in which the “target” — symbol of the final destination or of some ultimate meaning of things — is elusive and destined to move forever.

Right up to the piano's final notes, taking on so many shades and moods. Right up to the final words, trembling, almost weeping, in the distance:

Marco looks at the sea

He remains waiting

It is the waiting of one who has seen everything and met everyone. What is more desperate than someone who has seen everything and met everyone? And what is more desperate than someone who, like Giurato, could only do so in a dream?

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03/01/2016