Vinicio Capossela

There are marches, little marches, rebetiko tunes. There are the binary rhythms, the ones that need two crutches to move forward… and then the ternary ones, for toasts, for a waltz spin, one two three! Then there are the broken ones, pinstriped, out of fashion… and then trains and railways again, the old West derailed behind the rearguard of the Orient, the Greek route, and songs of war, geographic songs, pataphysical songs, and gypsy mariachi chants, serenades, trams, roses and umbrellas.

Everything here is perfectly danceable. Try it!

(From the album's liner notes)

A futurist cannon shot tearing through the last New Year's Eve of the twentieth century. A century-long binge. "Canzoni a manovella" is one of those works that manage to seize a moment and freeze it forever — the moment in which, like a dying man, the twentieth century rewinds the whole reel of its film before the curtain falls, taking with it its cast of characters, eras, inventions, traditions and cultural styles. And backstage, there he is, the diver-Capossela, sealed in his diving suit, cranking the handle of this time machine that blurs past and future into an epic worthy of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Paradoxical, for someone who only ever wanted to be a "confidential singer", a piano-bar crooner, which is indeed what the emigrant Vinicio was, touring in a Volkswagen van and playing clubs around Emilia in the late Eighties. So how did the intimate balladeer of "Una giornata senza pretese" suddenly rise to become the director of this spectacular, oversized end-of-century epic?

Perhaps it all began with the bender of "Liveinvolvo", when the street sweepers thought they were dreaming as they watched, in the dead of night, a blaring procession pass by, led by a singer in a fur hat. A colossal live musical binge, in the company of the gypsy mariachi of Kočani Orkestar. Sure, there had already been the blaze of Tom Waits setting off St. Vitus's dances and other deliriums, village pantomimes, grim crows and the back-alleys of Chiavicone. But it's from "Liveinvolvo" onward that Capossela permanently steers the course toward a voracious ethnomusicology. "Colic fits of imagination", he would call them, touched by a state of grace that is here also interpretive, given the breadth of a vocal range (from whisper to Waits-like rasp all the way to full-lung howling) rarely matched since.

By the time of "Canzoni a manovella", the former Vic Damone arrives after a long wandering through a small, ancient world, ranging from the southern Mediterranean to Eastern Europe, from the Macedonia of Milcho Manchevski (the director of "Before the Rain") to fabled Istanbul, from the rebetiko of Thessaloniki to the polkas of Warsaw. But the spark is also struck by his reading of Ferdinand Céline's novels, whose bleak, hyperbolic portrait of the human condition drags Capossela into that dark zeitgeist of a Europe torn apart by wars yet gripped by a feverish pioneering yearning. "Canzoni a manovella" thus becomes "a tribute to the pioneers of ballooning, to the daredevils, and in general to all those who have had the courage to throw themselves into the void". Just like the ineffable Courtial des Pereires, who in "Death on the Installment Plan" invents a hot-air balloon named Zelante; or Bardamu, the doctor protagonist of "Journey to the End of the Night", to whom the splendid eponymous ballad is dedicated, with barrel piano, strings, bass drum and the fateful final coup de canon, evoking the dawn of a new era, amid futurist flights of fancy and tutu-clad ballerinas: "The night has passed and the clouds/ swell with foam of Baltic and ash". "I haven't been the same person since I wrote it", Vinicio would swear.

To another daredevil of literature, Alfred Jarry, father of the Ubu cycle and of pataphysics (the science of imaginary solutions), is instead dedicated the unsettling march "Decervellamento", an anthem to the mechanical pillory of the wicked Ubu, reworked from the version written for Paolo Rossi (on "Hammamet ed altre storie") with an alienating Brecht-Weill-style arrangement that upends the original valse musette.

But the 20th century, as we said, was also a century of wars and tragedies, like that of the Jews deported to Auschwitz, documented in Primo Levi's “If This Is a Man”. It's a spectre that tears through the seemingly festive mood of “Suona Rosamunda”: “Let the circus burn and let the dance burn, and the uniforms drunk with love, the puppets march tightly packed, returning for us within the night.” The famous little tune “Rosamunda” – reworked from the Czechoslovakian Jaromír Vejvoda's “Modřanská polka” – is thus transformed into the torture inflicted on the protagonist, a prisoner of her Nazi tormentors, forced to play and dance in that carousel of horrors. A track steeped in Yiddish spice, thanks to the contribution of New York Jewish guitarist Marc Ribot and the violin played by Edoardo De Angelis.

The idea of something mechanical is already embedded in the album's title: in the beginning there was the Crank, the starter-motor, but also the necessary charge of wandering contraptions that scorch the air with familiar melodies. The songs thus fill up with bottle-phones, toy accordions, symphonic bass drums, nailed piano rolls, gramophone-horn trumpets, ondes Martenot, trumpet-violins, timbral jibes somewhere between the circus and the tavern. And so, bursting onto the flying carpet, comes the most rascally of “Maharajas”, for a Balkan pandemonium in which the “Arabian Nights” turn into a rollicking film by Emir Kusturica (“The Maharaja splits his sides, cracks his jaw, darkens the mood/ all the rabble bray when the Maharaja brays/ the guests roar loudly/ pouring out jugs and tankards”). The reference to Kusturica is no accident, since the Maharaja is inspired by Ahmed, the black-clad man from “Time of the Gypsies”, as well as by an unlikely nightclub owner Vinicio knew back in his early days on the road. The Balkan flavour is also guaranteed by the cimbalom and the gypsy violin of Fabrice Martinez, a Romanian transplanted to France.

The circus is one of Capossela's fatal attractions, fascinated as he is by the greasepaint-smeared mask of “Pagliacci”, improbable flea-tamers forced to make others laugh while incapable of being normal themselves (“the greasepaint feels like clay to me, the clown's sickness sticks to my face, tonight I'd like to laugh, I'd like to laugh for myself”). Like Calvero, the character from “Limelight”: after all, the affinity with the Chaplin universe had already been sealed a year earlier, when Capossela himself scored “Modern Times”, and here he stages a ¾-time pantomime driven by a skittering piano and a pump harmonium.

The circus-like swagger doesn't disappear even in the darkest episodes, always reinterpreted through a caustic sense of humour. As in the deranged funeral song of “Marcia del camposanto”, an ode to Southern Italian religious superstition, crowded with unsettling humanity (the gravediggers, the sacristan, the materdomina, the mammanonna, the archpriest, the war-lamed marshal's wife) and an equally sinister company of nocturnal birds and animals: from the “heartbroken great tit” to the “crow croaking in the thicket”, right down to the malogna, one of the notorious beasts of the Cupa, whose “moan” one hopes will bring no more “bad luck”. And of course there's no shortage of the two gold coins to be placed on the eyes of the deceased, “bloated with beer, seated on his throne, at the slow pace of forgiveness”. An irresistible noir appetizer, in short, for the future Land of the Coppoloni, seasoned with the unmistakable brass of Roy Paci.

That same mocking spirit also marks the first rebetiko infatuation of “Contratto per Karelias”. Capossela's idyll with the “Greek blues” — to which he would later devote an entire album (“Rebetiko Gymnastas”, 2012) — here languishes amid the melancholy smoke of George Karelias and Sons cigarettes made in Kalamata, for a tale of lost love adapted from a song by the king of Piraeus, Markos Vamvakaris, with another formidable lyric full of assonances and biting imagery (“I've tattooed you onto my skin/ like a rattlesnake, so I'll remember/ the asp within my heart”).

But the Balkans are also a land of wars, like the one that bloodied Kosovo: Capossela captures it through a single detail, a black train speeding past amid the bombs, like that soldier fleeing towards an impossible dawn and a bride with a torn veil who will never return (the anguished “Corre il soldato”, built entirely around the dialogue between the usual brass, Giancarlo Bianchetti's guitar solo and Ribot's banjo).

The brine-soaked nursery rhyme of the title track marks instead the first plunge into that salty lexical universe that would become a leit-motif for Capossela's future work, with a string of dazzling rhymes: “Time is an alembic/ slowly sinking us down”, “from the bottom of a rock/ black with cuttlefish ink like oil”, “a flash of scales gleamed/ in the verdigris abyss”, “an echo shook the keel/ of the crew inside the bottle”, “the deep-sea diver dives in/ wearing his squid-like suit”, “all around they preen themselves/ with brilliantine seals”. But the sounds too are steeped in brine, from Ribot's “siren guitar”, amplified with an e-bow, to the clatter of bottles used as percussion, from brass instruments run through a tube to achieve an underwater effect, to sonar pings and other submarine-style effects. And among the crew of the final choruses, even Manuel Agnelli of Afterhours turns up.

Then there's the inevitable chapter of ballads. The gypsy enchantment of the tango “Solo mia” stems from an adaptation of the Macedonian “Bilo cija” by Koçani Orkestar. The fairy-tale waltz of “Pianoforti di Lubecca”, put together with Pascal Comelade for piano, toy piano and Edison cylinder, is enriched by the singing of Japanese soprano Mayumi Torikoshi, telling the enchantment of old pianos abandoned in a gunpowder factory that one evening begin to speak and play old, demodé nocturnes. The bluesy serenade of “Signora luna” hurls Leopardi's imagery into a metaphysical western à la “Dead Man”, thanks to Ribot's ghostly guitars and the obsessive double bass of Ares Tavolazzi. The waltz drenched in melancholy and strings of “Nella pioggia” is an ode to beloved Milan, the city of “sugar and tar”, to borrow Dalla's words, which “gleams with iron and rails”, with the ceaseless coming and going of its trams and trains (“that leave every hour, but we never leave”) and the signs that “paint lovers behind windows streaked with steam”.

The closing “Resto qua”, on the other hand, is the lump-in-the-throat snapshot of a show's end, when the audience leaves and the artist is hurled in an instant from the warmth of applause into the icy void of solitude, while “the curtain remains”: a poignant farewell, amid strings filtered through an old gramophone, fairground sounds and fireworks. Finally, the aching '50s-style rumba of “Con una rosa” (inspired by Oscar Wilde's “The Nightingale and the Rose”) is actually an outtake: it wasn't a hand-cranked song, but Capossela added it to the track list anyway, captivated by its melodic grandeur, which glides majestically among congas, strings and jazzy guitars.

Vinicio Capossela looks at the world through a porthole (see the cover art) and gives it back to us as an image of overflowing, Fellini-esque creativity, aided by a squad of top-tier musicians and the skilled direction of Tommaso Vittorini, the album's orchestrator and arranger, who would later recount all the trials of its gestation, from the author's quirks (for instance, his aversion to drums, replaced with iron pipes left lying around the recording studio) to the long process of research (including visits to the Museo Marini in Ravenna, where a host of curious musical instruments were gathered, some of which were used on the songs). A monumental and certainly not easy album, but built with means of expression lighter than air. Ambitious, yes, but never pretentious.

It's the crowbar with which Capossela pries open the last resistance of a critical establishment that from here on would begin to venerate him almost unconditionally. And to the objection that will perhaps haunt him forever, let's let him answer for himself: “Did I go overboard? Yes, that's certainly true. But doesn't life go overboard too?”.

P.S. And if this review too has seemed overblown, let's invoke the same excuse.

Thanks to Laura Rizzo for the wealth of information made available in the book “Canzoni a manovella – Vinicio Capossela” (Arcana, 2015).

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22/05/2016