Claudio Lolli
Il Grande Freddo

“In Bologna, decisions are made at the osteria or ideas come at the osteria… so one ordinary evening, we found ourselves in front of one of those long and rough tables chatting about football. It was snowing outside. It was cold, it was Thursday. I don't know why, but a Kasdan movie, "The Big Chill," came to mind, and I started narrating it. I'm a very good storyteller, but that night I found them particularly interested in what I was saying: they raised objections, asked for clarifications, shared experiences of imprisonment and oppression. Suddenly it became clear to everyone: those talks needed to transform into something less ephemeral” (Claudio Lolli).

This is how "The Big Chill" by Claudio Lolli was born, his last work released in 2017. He died the following year. With the album, he won the "Premio Tenco" as the best work of the year, the most coveted prize for songwriters finally awarded to the Bolognese poet after a 45-year career and an album recorded thanks to crowdfunding, the love of those who always cared for him. In the recording studio with Lolli were Danilo Tomasetta and Roberto Soldati, who had played in the album "Ho visto anche degli zingari felici," along with Felice Del Gaudio, Lele Veronesi, Pasquale Morgante, and long-time friends Paolo Capodacqua and Nicola Alesini. The album is embellished with drawings by a Puglian artist, Enzo De Giorgi, who painted the pages of the booklet containing the lyrics.

"The Big Chill" is what we carry inside. Our inability to love despite having the potential: “how much love wasted on buses among people who could care for each other”. A chill that “can only be melted with the tears of our passions” but makes life “only a struggle but too often a lost battle”. A song about the feeling of regret where in the end Lolli, accompanied by the exquisite phrasing of a saxophone, recites his last verse: “I have a lost gaze and broken ribs”. "La fotografia sportiva" is among Lolli's most beautiful songs. Absolutely. A piece on the poverties of our time, where “we must try to know who we are and where we come from”, on the life that is always frantic, that always rushes and doesn't use the brake downhill. The final sax is a thin dagger, stabbing into the mind from which emerges the plot of those happy gypsies never forgotten. Regret returns in the song "Non chiedere", where Claudio cites Montale, in which the existential malaise we all suffer or have suffered from burns like an open wound; a train expected at the station full of friends to make the revolution, a train that never arrives and that makes you lose any perspective (“and the fact that I no longer dream and I should” Claudio tells us). The song, musically splendid, is wrapped in Morgante's piano and sax and harmonica that make it a precious gem. I consider "400000 colpi" (a reference to a Truffaut film) a song of love and solitude where the "do you remember" of a house, a sun, a body to love takes you to the moment of death because you always live together and always die alone. Great the finale with Roberto Soldati's guitar and Nicola Alesini's sax. Claudio's voice, although weakened, is always that “full of spiders, crabs, frogs, and other strange things, voice of the kingdom of the many or of the underworld festival” as he defined it himself in "Autobiografia industriale". "Sai com’è" is an act of love. The posthumous letter from Giovanni Pesce, a partisan, to his wife Onorina Brambilla. A declaration of love, where even in times of resistance there is a way to make love (“love needs little, darkness or a bed or a meadow. Love needs little as long as it's tenderness”). The music is by Marino Severini of the Gang. The arrangements of the album are superb and refined, evident also in the "bossonova-like" sound of "gli uomini senza amore", the disillusion of being incapable of love, of being men who end up only in dead and sad beds and have dreams only full of smoke. Dreams only to tell. The CD with every listen leaves you with some more emotion, as in "Prigioniero politico", not an autobiographical piece but an almost happy declaration of non-belonging. It is clear this world does not belong to him so Claudio declares himself a political prisoner. Another finale by Soldati and his guitars that with wonderful arpeggios return in the disenchanted "Principessa messamale" devotion to the female universe even if with adverse developments (“look at how the world has changed, the one we so believed in and how the future has passed without even asking us for a minute”). In the spoken finale of "Raggio di sole", we witness the hope that the warmth of the sun can give. Pale sun but sun. Is it a dream? Is it false? The hope is that the warmth can melt all that cold we have inside. But in Lolli, (obviously) there are no certainties, the ray of sun disappears to make way again for the cold, still to be overcome.

"The Big Chill" is a work of the highest level. Perhaps second only to the unsurpassable "Ho visto anche degli zingari felici". Dear Claudio, we all owe you a bit of love, because even if you are dead, you will always be Claudio Lolli to us.