Colloquio
Il Giardino Delle Lacrime

In the generally foreign-loving little Italy, which today - when patriotic - is only capable of producing twenty new song phenomena every month, squeezed mercilessly with forced marketing strokes to sell nothing as artistic, I keep asking myself why our truly great songwriters have been relegated to a niche from which they can never escape.

Gianni Pedretti, known as Colloquio, has been producing songs of enviable quality for over thirty years. He has nothing to fear when compared to the renowned, now decrepit and calcified great names of our tradition; nor does he need to fear comparison with any new talents who, despite being talented, enjoy disproportionate attention thanks to management and marketing.

Colloquio is a project that is occasionally discussed. It's spoken of well, but only a little. I retrieved the cassette of Il giardino delle lacrime, which I believe is Pedretti's debut work. At the time published only on tape and I think never reissued on other formats. An album with a well-crafted package and musically still a little raw, only refined in parts. However, it has an emotional power that leaves a mark.

Songs like "Io e te Pier" or "Bella vita" have a dreamy and enveloping atmosphere that makes even the simplest lyrical passages penetrating. Colloquio's poetry is intimate, decadent, almost Gozzano-like. You can smell the scent of old good things, but you also feel the desire to touch deep strings with a sound that I would describe as "contemporary chamber." A noble mixture of lounge, minimalism, easy-jazz, and a bit of electronic.

Here and there, inaccuracies and naiveties typical of a self-produced debut do not spoil the overall cohesion of the work. Pedretti then demonstrated with subsequent works that he has the fine grain and knows how to best dress his disenchanted texts musically. In pieces like "La forma dell'addio," there's an emotional and evocative power that I have rarely found in Italian songwriting. And then the final track "La dea dal trono d'acciaio," dedicated to an unfortunate friend confined to a wheelchair: a magnificent piece, touching, wise in words, and engaging in rhythm, with a final instrumental that sends a shiver down your spine.

"But please follow me: this is so false that sometimes it would be better to only dream it."

Goosebumps.

See, we need people like Gianni Pedretti because they give us the certainty that the Italian music scene survives beyond the tabletop-constructed trends and the trappers born in the morning and guillotined in the evening. And perhaps also because they compensate for that sense of imbalance that someone like me feels when forced to put on a fifty-year-old De Gregori record to cleanse my palate a bit.