Enzo Jannacci
The Best

I am currently listening, for the umpteenth time since I bought it, to the magnificent CD1 of the double album "The Best" by Enzo Jannacci, an album that calling "anthological" would really be far too reductive, released by Ala Bianca at the end of 2006 and unfortunately lost too soon (despite some recent appearances by Jannacci on TV shows by friends Fabio Fazio and Cochi & Renato) in the apocalyptic flood of double and triple box sets - these indeed are anthological, in the most conventional sense of the term - by other artists, all supported by much larger and more powerful record labels than his.

I have a weakness for CD1, but not because CD2 is not beautiful in its own right, as it will result in incredible emotional impact for those who - unlike the undersigned - do not possess the most recent studio work of the great Milanese singer-songwriter, namely the one released from 2001 onwards by the admirable Ala Bianca of Toni Verona, a small record label that has the enormous merit of having given him back a fresh and vibrant recording life, after the bitter disappointments caused by the majors; foremost among these was Sony, which only wanted to release "compiléscion", as Jannacci calls them, forcing him to keep all unpublished works in the drawer "because you don’t sell anymore". Unmissable in this regard is the scathing dedication handwritten by Jannacci in the booklet of his first album "of the renaissance", namely "Come gli aeroplani", released by Ala Bianca in 2001 (followed by "L'uomo a metà", Ala Bianca, 2003, and "Milano 3. 6. 2005", Ala Bianca, 2004), and addressed without many veils to those obtuse multinational record sellers, who were about to kill his indomitable artistic genius without remedy.

I recommend "The Best" to everyone indiscriminately, early Jannacci fans and newcomers, without distinction, because this is definitely not "the usual box set", although merely reading its title, perhaps too banal, might lead one to think so.

It is much more.

The songs not from the Ala Bianca albums from the 2001-2004 period (about twenty or so, out of a total of 35) have been entirely rearranged from scratch by that monster of skill named Paolo Jannacci (I adore, just to mention one of his countless subtleties, the use of the bass in a "Giovanni telegrafista" made modern despite its nearly 40 years of existence), and entirely re-sung by his father in great form (with his 71-year-old voice, paradoxically much clearer, more powerful, and - yes - also much more in tune compared to the youthful voice with which Enzo recorded the original tracks!).

This operation of profound makeover is anything but a stale commercial gimmick aimed at recycling and reheating "the usual stuff" (as all too often happens with other artists). In fact, I'll say more: it was really needed. Many of these songs - including the relatively recent "La fotografia", a highly dramatic track full of pathos but also humanity, which hits you straight like a punch wrapped in the glove of pain (moreover it won the Critics Award at the Sanremo Festival 1991), existed before only within vinyls long out of catalog, shamefully never reissued on CD; it was simply a crime not to make them more known, around.

We can thus re-appreciate "Dona che te durmivet" (a delicate portrait, female but also almost proto-feminist, first appearing in the album "Sei minuti all'alba" from 1966; inexplicably not revisited by Enzo in his beautiful "Milano 3. 6. 2005" but reproposed by him, along with the tracks of that album, in the recent theater tour winter-spring 2005-2006), but in an unpublished version translated for the first time from Milanese to Italian titled "Donna che dormivi".

We can thus, equally, relish "La Costruzione", an intense version of one of Chico Buarque de Hollanda's masterpieces, sung in Italian even by other artists (for example Vanoni); a piece that appears totally akin to Jannacci's poetics, to his "bestiary" of suffering, unlucky, modest, ignored humanity, with that poor man dying falling from a scaffold like a flaccid package, fluttering like a sparrow, disturbing the traffic... The first time I heard this song was indeed in Vanoni's version, and it didn’t move me at all - even though the theme of the piece was as dramatic as possible - due to the excessively cold touch given to it by the performer. With the Jannaccian version, the exact opposite happens, and one feels it could well have come from his pen, as it certainly seems to come from his heart.

Then there's a "Quelli che… " updated, revised, and corrected with new biting and hilarious lines, all to be discovered. And so on, delighting us.

I could spend the night talking about this album full of beautiful, thoughtful, highly stimulating, musically sparkling things… but even on the unreleased front, it’s no joke: beyond an extraordinary "Bartali" "da osteria" placed at the opening of CD2, sung in duet by Enzo and its author Paolo Conte (142 years between them next June 3rd… and not feeling them!), I find particularly that "Rien ne va plus", the opening track of CD1, harsh and moving at the same time, is a true masterpiece, in the vein of the most authentic and perhaps less known Jannacci: not the jester, not irreverent but aching and heartfelt in singing - without ever indulging in unnecessary sophisms and hermeticisms - about the adventure and misadventure of life. A life, this one sung by Jannacci in the leading track, which at first is seen as a "beautiful fountain", but then, little by little as it is lived, it transforms - by virtue of a sort of perverse, damnedly real morphing - into something else, while the marble of that roulette which is life itself keeps spinning, not understanding that "you, as a story, no longer go", culminating - with overwhelming force - in the juxtaposition between one of those gleeful expressions fished from the archives of the most rhetorical sports commentary modernariato ( "Great Pantani escapes uphill/ Goes away as if on a trip") and Enzo's painful, angry scream immediately following ("Ugly whore that is 'this life!/ Lives among flies and jasmine… "), all of it expressed through an immediacy of symbolism which is stronger and more effective than a thousand abstract speeches and a thousand philosophical dissertations on the precariousness of human destinies.

Therefore, I invite you to purchase and listen to this work, always keeping in your heart the pious wish to one day witness the reissue on CD of at least some of the countless extraordinary "old" Jannacci albums, never published - and it really seems incredible to even write it here - except on vinyl, too many years ago now.