Archivio Crepax
Crepax a 33 giri

Many (and I mean many...) summers ago, as a kid on vacation with my parents, I found myself, for reasons I can't remember, in a little shop in a small town in Trentino: they sold appliances, stereo systems, and some records. As I was flipping through the vinyl, I pulled out one that particularly caught my eye. The band's name, Garybaldi, and the album title "Nuda." I didn't know the group. I had never heard of them, neither on "Per voi giovani" or "Supersonic," nor from my friends; radio and friends were the media back then to discover new music, apart from Ciao2001 and a few other magazines. The cover was really out of the ordinary: a beautiful dark-haired girl, nude indeed, was drawn across three panels of the cover, featuring a graphic work over 90 cm by 30 cm. She was immersed in a landscape reminiscent of the savanna, with wild animals on a reduced scale surrounding her and leaping onto her body. She was sinuous and indifferent to the animals and a group of explorers, also on a reduced scale, trying to climb up her long black hair. I bought the record. Obviously for the cover. After a few years, having moved on to blues and jazz, I grew tired of the record, which I still find disappointing, and I exchanged it for other LPs. Damn, it was the original that I never found again.

Later, I realized it was mainly the cover that made that record historic: it was designed by Guido Crepax.

"Crepax a 33 giri" has just come out, and I gifted it to myself. Curated by the Crepax Archive, managed by Guido's heirs, it's a truly beautiful book, perfectly placed among the vinyl records. 111 pages 30X30, with color images (which is not obvious, as we will see) and comments and insights on the history of the covers and testimonies on who Guido Crepax was, with his passion for jazz and, of course, for drawing.

The volume aims to be a complete collection of Crepax's designed covers, although I think there are some missing. There are 277 covers of 7", 10", and 12" published, with an addendum listing, with label and catalog number, those with identical images but in colors different from the works reproduced in photos.

The first part of the book features signatures of musicians, enthusiasts, illustrators with testimonies and comments collected for the occasion or republished: Bollani, Fresu, Mughini, Jim Flora, Polillo, Altan, among others. I particularly enjoyed the testimony of Franco Crepax, Guido's brother, who, working as a record executive, was the link between the illustrator and the world of vinyl production. The story told by Riccardo Sanna, aka Ricky Gianco, is nice; for one of his first 45s together with singer Nuccia Bongiovanni he underwent a photo shoot. Gianco was eagerly waiting for the disc to be released with the cover photo of him and the singer dancing the twist. Great disappointment when the 7" came out: against a yellow background, there was an elegant couple of dancers drawn, having little to do with the twist and rock 'n' roll. Only later did he realize that the cover was not signed "by the usual, more or less good, graphic designer, but by an artist," namely Guido Crepax.

The section dedicated to the actual catalog is introduced by 2 pages of extreme interest, with the publication of some covers containing the 78 rpm jazz records from the collection of his father Gilberto Crepas, a cellist at La Fenice and La Scala. The young Guido didn't like those anonymous black cardboard sleeves: so he reworked them by drawing images of musicians, instruments, situations alluding to the content of the records, already demonstrating a definitive vocation for drawing and a notable sensitivity in associating the same images with musical themes.

Following that, the beautiful covers that the future creator of Valentina devised for the "audiobooks," 7" Extended Plays recorded by actors reading prose or reciting poetry. Some of these designs are already genuine works of art: flamenco dancers come to mind for the covers of Garcia Lorca's poetry records, or the romantic style used for the cover of "Les Fleurs du Mal" by Baudelaire, or even the stylized American metropolis on the rare EP dedicated to Beat Generation poets.

Crepax adapted his genius to all musical genres, as well as literary. Beautiful are the covers of the Glax seven-inch records with science fiction stories: a literary field in which he had already drawn front pages for the Galaxy magazine.

The collection then develops by featuring LP and EP sleeves of classical and orchestral music, fairy tales and children's songs, tango and popular music records. And then the more well-known ones of pop music, designed between the late '60s and the '70s, for Nicola Di Bari, Massimo Ranieri, Peppino Di Capri, Memo Remigi, I Camaleonti; in short, artwork that accompanied commercial music, and thus had the opportunity to enter, at the time, into many homes. Stunning, albeit truly "rare" to find, is the melancholic and sweet black-and-white face of the Mariù sung in the early '60s by Gordon Cliff, aka Luigi Tenco.

But Guido Crepax's true passion was jazz. His works are in line with those of David Stone Martin. From Dixieland to Be-bop, from Biederbecke, Armstrong, Cootie Williams to Earl Hines, Bud Shank, Charlie Parker, Modern Jazz Quartet, Jerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, the images truly provide great charm to the covers. Often using just 2 colors as the background, black lines delineate the dynamism of the musicians and the typical jazz atmospheres.

The cover of my "crush," Nuda, is rightly reproduced in full on two pages. It serves as an introduction to the interview with Maurizio Cassinelli, Garybaldi's drummer, within a section dedicated to Italian Prog and particularly to the "Birth of Nuda."

The final "gift" of the volume is the reproduction, with magnificent illustrations for the first time in color, of "Extraordinary Paintings." Twenty-seven pages that constituted the final part of "Bianca, an excessive story," a story that Crepax had begun drawing in '68. When in '72 Franco Crepax, who at the time was working for the Compagnia Generale del Disco, asked Guido to prepare the cover for the Garybaldi album, with the track "Maya Desnuda" at the opening, the character was already ready. In the words of the Crepax Archive, "Young, rebellious, modern and at the same time ancient, tormented and out of the ordinary," Bianca became Nuda.

And although I no longer have, alas, the Garybaldi LP, I have retrieved from the shelf the old Savelli reprint of Bianca's story. A bit dusty, with nearly all the pages detached, but which still, after fifty years, manages to express the anarchic force of transgression and sensuality that emerged from Guido Crepax's pencils.