Alan Sorrenti

Before storming the sales charts with the wildly popular dance hit "Figli delle stelle," Alan Sorrenti had truly been a child of the stars, or at least a star-sailor (any reference to Tim Buckley and his "Starsailor" is of course intentional), thanks to "Aria," his visionary 1972 debut.

It was the era of the progressive wave that, having set off from Albion's shores with genre pioneers like King Crimson, Van Der Graaf Generator and Genesis, was rapidly spreading across Europe, Italy included. It's no coincidence that in that very same 1972, at home PFM released "Storia di un minuto," a classic of Italian prog-rock featuring the immortal "Impressioni di settembre," while Naples' own Balletto di Bronzo put out the apocalyptic "Ys," a concept album that stylistically followed in the footsteps of the early Emerson, Lake & Palmer records.

What's more, within a year the firmament of Italian prog would be enriched by two further masterpieces: the revolutionary (not just musically but politically too) "Arbeit Macht Frei" by the militant Area, and Le Orme's "Felona e Sorona," a record steeped in science-fiction atmospheres directly inspired by the work of Peter Hammill and co.

In this scenario, Alan Sorrenti comes across as something of an outsider, both because he's a solo artist and because his artistic vision doesn't align with that of most of his Italian peers. The Campania-born musician of Welsh descent opts instead for a musical formula steeped in dreamlike folk and psychedelic experimentation, which only secondarily takes on the stylistic traits of progressive rock. Like Area, who had moved beyond the genre's fanciful literary themes and (extreme) left-wing politics, Sorrenti too drifts away from the prog stereotype - a stereotype that made its own mark on history, especially through introspective lyrics and an imagery quite different from that favoured by the genre's masters: in his songs there are no references to fantastical worlds, parallel universes, or hallucinatory near or distant futures. Like a singer-songwriter haunted by an oppressive absence, Sorrenti pursues, in poetic and at times hermetic verses, the symbiotic, carnal and purifying love of the title track ("L'alba nasce in te, il giorno muore con te" and again "Sono entrato nel tuo corpo. Sono io l'universo. Sono io il tuo corpo") or the impossible love sung about in "Vorrei incontrarti," which might console loneliness and redeem the emptiness of existence ("Vorrei conoscerti, ma non so come chiamarti. Vorrei seguirti, ma la gente ti sommerge. I was waiting for you when it was raining outside and my room was full of silence for you").

Even though some accuse it of having aged, "Aria" remains one of the most intense records ever released in Italy. The fairy-tale, enchanted atmosphere running through the album wards off any chance of it being heard today as a dated work, instead placing it outside of time and the world altogether. The whole record is an unbroken flow of celestial melodies, arcane harmonies and Dionysian arrangements, shaping open, free-flowing tracks in a thoroughly free-form style.

On this debut record Sorrenti is backed by a band of real substance, made up of Tony Esposito (drums and percussion), Vittorio Nazzaro (bass and classical guitar) and Albert Prince who, besides handling the arrangements, plays all the keyboards (piano, Hammond organ, Mellotron, synthesizer) and accordion. Also contributing to the album are Tony Bonfils (double bass), Jean Costa (trombone), André Lajidli (trumpet) and Jean Luc Ponty, who graces the nearly twenty minutes of the opening track with his magical violin.

Amid rustling wind sounds and fairy-tale arpeggios, "Aria" begins - the summa of Sorrenti's metaphysical singing, an ethereal flow of phonemes, an ecstatic stretching-out of vowels and syllables, in which the modulations of his voice, at the end of each line, erupt into terrifying declamatory spasms. For its part, the band ventures into a forest of ancestral sounds, frenetic rhythms and otherworldly melodies, unfurling striking shifts in register that defy detailed description.

The dreamy melancholy of the moving "Vorrei incontrarti" marks the album's other high point: a wandering folk piece roaming the valleys of imagination and memory, shaped by the evocative interplay between Sorrenti's acoustic guitar and Nazzaro's classical guitar.

From the Apollonian mood of "Vorrei incontrarti" to the Dionysian rush of "La mia mente" is a short step; all it takes is a dynamic rhythm section to bolster the track's folk foundation, along with Albert Prince's expressive jazz virtuosity on electric piano.

The deep, dark sound of a double bass opens the closing "Un fiume tranquillo," which, as it unfolds, alternates singer-songwriter moments with striking instrumental passages for piano, trumpet and rhythm section.

After "Aria," the druid-like Alan Sorrenti pictured on the cover would slowly give way to the Festivalbar-ready Alan Sorrenti, the one behind "Figli delle stelle" and "L'unica donna per me," the two best-known songs of his career, which had Italians dancing between 1977 and 1979. But even that success wouldn't last long, and after an appearance at Sanremo in 1988, both radio and television would soon forget about him. We, chronic sufferers of good-music addiction, prefer to remember him like this.

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05/09/2010