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Rating: The now eighty-five-year-old Mingardi is a remarkable Bolognese bluesman from the very early days, already on the scene in the late '50s: solid voice, undeniable preparation and passion for rhythm & blues. To make a better living, buy himself a house and support his ex-wives, since the '80s he has put his musical roots on the back burner and done everything possible to get into the Italian songwriting circle, the one with an Arena di Verona full of screaming monkeys for Mediaset evenings and Hunziker or some other hottie as hosts. He has participated multiple times in the Sanremo Festival, tried to do as much television as possible, adapted to interpreting other people's compositions and selling his own compositions to ever-voracious sharks like Mina and others, often becoming mawkish and "serious," he the personification of irony.
These national popular efforts of his have yielded modest results, in the sense that he hasn't managed to become a big name in Italian pop, remaining at an intermediate level. As an Italian pop artist, he's dispensable, as a bluesman he's quite respectable even though obviously completely derivative; where he is (was) truly strong, alas, is in an inevitably narrow musical niche, namely the comic song in the Bolognese dialect. At goofing around, he's a dragon, and I've experienced it firsthand at several of his concerts. Privately he might be a big jerk, but on stage, making people laugh in Bolognese, supported by his own rich repertoire of hilarious situational songs, he risks your abs... You hold your stomach from laughter, but clearly, you need to know that dialect, rich in indigenous words, and thus have dealings with, or perhaps have long been involved with even if not anymore (like me), Emilia Romagna.
With that said, let's go with his long-play debut, dated 1974 (at the 45 rpm single level he had been on the scene since 1962). The early years of LP releases are indeed all dedicated to farce and irony in a Bolognese sauce... His first "serious" album would only come out in 1985, as his career's sixth.
The highlight of the ten songs (sometimes with spoken parts) present in this album is the masterpiece "A io’ vest un marzian". The phrase referring to the description of the Martian in question that remains etched, more in my cracked ribs from fits of laughter than in my heart, is:
"L'avèva trai* gamb, óna piò curta" (*trai = three)
Sotili sotili pareven grisséin
Con dòu stèva in pì l'ètra éra mòrta
Pròpri cumpagna* l'usèl ed Sandrén" (*cumpagna = like)
Who knows how his friend Sandrino (if a real person, and with that name) took it at the time... Then there are other episodes almost equally hilarious, like "Azidant a cal dé", "Dal tajadel", and especially "Gig", meaning Gigi, a fervent exaltation of a kind of Bolognese Fonzie, gifted and soaring in everything but schooling and culture; in fact, his favorite motto is:
"Nessuno siam perfetti, ciascuno abbiamo i suoi difetti".
Tracklist
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