Fabrizio De André
Creuza De Ma

I believe this is, hands down, De André's most beautiful work and one of the highest in the Italian (and global, since it was also appreciated by a certain David Byrne) songwriting landscape. I am biased, I have a visceral relationship with Liguria and consider it not only the most beautiful region in Italy, but one of the most important artistic and cultural points in the whole of Europe (and I'm quiet, as they say here in Milan). Moreover, it is an album released in the year I was born, so you see how things fit together.

De André, after "L'Indiano" written together with Bubola, the second chapter in the folk-rock twist after "Rimini" (an excellent twist, it must be said), feels the need to completely detach from that music and has a crazy idea in mind: a concept in which to tell the story of a sailor who, after thirty years, finally returns home, profoundly changed and somehow shaken by what he had seen crossing the Mediterranean. Small detail: the work was supposed to be written and thus sung in a totally invented language, a grammelot worthy of the best Dario Fo, in which Genoese, Spanish, Portuguese, and all the dialects of southern Italy, plus Greek, would coexist. Madness, but only up to a point. Because De André, digging into Mediterranean tradition, comes across the true story of a certain Cicala, a Genoese boatswain captured by the Ottoman Turks in the second half of the 15th century and who, having saved the Bey's life, was even made a pasha. The idea will not be discarded and will become the opening of the B side of the album: Sinan Capudàn Pascia.

"The songs of the album were supposed to represent the sense of the journey, of leaving by sea and returning, so intimate in the seafaring and erratic soul of the Genoese, and to more broadly convey the indomitable and adventurous spirit of so many travelers and sailors from the various countries bordering the Mediterranean basin. Hence the need to enrich the songs with sounds that drew from the rich blend of popular instruments and typical sounds of the Mediterranean area the ethnic suggestions necessary for the purpose [...]" (Fabrizio Pezzoli, 100 Dischi per capire la Nuova Canzone Italiana)

The ideas struggle to come together until, at the Castle of Carimate, De André, who is completing the last opus in league with Bubola, meets Mauro Pagani, former PFM, who was working on the music of Salvatores’ Sogno di una notte d’estate. The encounter is decisive.

"[...] From a compositional point of view, in a couple of months I wrote all the music, but the production in the studio was much more difficult. We started in August and delivered the masters by Christmas. There was much to do, and he was very courageous because, as a singer-songwriter, he decided to make a record that even in Genoa would not have been completely understood, he defended it and hid it from Ricordi until the very end. Only this involved a tide of doubts and rethinking. After Crêuza de mä I was exhausted, I was in bed for three months" (Mauro Pagani, Rolling Stone)

"[...] He himself came from the tour experience with PFM, which had filled his songs with violins, mandolins, guitars. So rather than hire different instrumentalists, he called me who played a bit of everything… being a good Genoese he loved to save (laughs). At first with him, I was a stage musician, but meanwhile, I had begun to record the songs that would end up on the album: during the tour, I would pick him up by car and on the trip, we listened to these tapes of mine… 'Beautiful, beautiful, let's do it!' he would say. For a while, I didn't take him seriously, then gradually this idea of making a record in grammelot emerged, before choosing Genoese as the language" (Mauro Pagani, Rolling Stone)

Using instruments of all kinds except classical ones, and after a trip in the Mediterranean in which De André and Pagani cemented their friendship and knowledge of the popular music of those areas, the work in the studio is, as reported by Pagani himself, meticulous. In the recording studio of Carimate resonate the vibrations of oud, bouzouki, saz, mandola, mandolin, viola, violin, and gaida, with a synthesizer and few classical guitars as the exceptions. What results is 33 minutes to be immortalized in the history of music. Thanks especially to De André's stubbornness, who wrote the entire work in Genoese, not modern, mind you, but ancient Genoese.

"[...] The very close artistic collaboration between the two soon yielded the desired results and De André's idea of resorting to the Genoese dialect - in which a thousand words of Arabic origin are already contained - [...] was the definitive turning point three-quarters of the way through the work" (Pezzoli)

Ricordi, which produced and distributed the album, frowned. It was all well and good that it was De André, but an album sung in Genoese (which even a Genoese would have struggled to fully understand) seemed like the precursor to disaster, so much so that at Ricordi they let slip the not entirely positive hope: "Let's hope to sell at least a few copies in Genoa and the surroundings." It came out at the beginning of March 1984, initially struggled to gain traction but soon became a classic to the extent that, at the time, it was followed by a triumphant theatrical tour that brought De André into contact with the public (and six long years passed for the Genoese singer-songwriter before releasing the new album, "Le Nuvole", 1990).

The album, which opens with the famous sound of the gaida by Theodoros Kekes, marks the arrival in Genoa of the sailor (the concept idea was never, entirely, abandoned) and the revisiting, at last, of familiar sights, scents of Liguria that smell of home, of sea, of life (the white of Portofino; the sweet and sour pie) and going to eat at Andrea’s place, and who knows what kind of people will be there, perhaps people not too recommendable (faces from Lugano, that is the swindlers, that is how those who came from "non-seaside" places were defined in ancient Genoese and were viewed with suspicion, so much so that, as the song says, not being used to eating sea fish, they do not even grasp the difference between fish and meat, "they prefer the wing of the bass"), to which is seamlessly joined the portrayal of the prostitute Jamin-A:

"[...]

"… Jamin-a is not a dream, but rather the hope for a truce. A truce in the face of a possible force eight sea, or even a shipwreck. I mean that Jamin-a is a possibility of a positive adventure that, in a corner of the sailor's imagination, always and however finds space and refuge. Jamin-a is the companion of an erotic journey, that every sailor hopes, or rather demands, to find in every place after the dangerous blows suffered due to an enemy sea or a careless commander" (Fabrizio De André)

and the vision of Sidùn, introduced by the voices of Sharon and Reagan, which sees in the city of Sidon (Lebanon) at the time torn apart by civil war, the agony of a father seeing his own child perish under the wheels of a tank. Jamin-A, which abruptly ends after an almost infinite sequence of plucked instrument sounds that turn into a hypnotic sensual and "violent" dance, contrasts precisely with Sidùn, where a solitary bouzouki and the sad voice of a man in a Palestinian refugee camp manage to still make vibrate, in the air, a residue of humanity.

Side B opens with the story of Cicala. The rhythm intensifies, becomes decidedly Mediterranean, and the incredible events of this Genoese who became an important man in a Muslim region (he being Christian) slip away like honey; after all, ours is a sly opportunist (see the fish metaphor in the chorus) who does not have much to change as a lifestyle except for no longer blaspheming the Lord but Mohammed. It's incredible how this piece is, at the bottom, the basis of the idea of the "Creuza de má" project: maybe it's truly the theme of the journey and the being or appearing of what one is or is not, that is the foundation of the entire album. Like the waves of the Mediterranean that unveil and veil secrets and horizons. Or like the thorough tax collector in the very delicate 'A pittima (note that the term pittima was common also in Piedmont and Campania):

"The character is the result of social marginalization, at least as I describe him, due mainly to his physical shortcomings. "What can I do if I do not have the arms to be a sailor, if my chest is as wide as a finger, just enough to hide with the dress behind a thread": this is the lament of one forced by a nature anything but benevolent to choose, to survive, a certainly unpopular job. [...] So I imagined my pittima as a bird that cannot spread its wings and is destined to feed on the waste of barnyard birds" (Fabrizio De André)

Here is my favorite track. (I know it's a review, and I should be impartial). "A dumenega". Many years ago, early twentieth century, in Genoa the prostitutes worked all day, and on Sundays they were exempted, for a morning, from duty and could walk freely on the street. Now, the clients, especially if married, pretended not to recognize them. Worse, they insulted them (there is a connection here to La Città Vecchia, a De André song from many years earlier: "The one you call contemptuously public wife by day, the one who at night sets the price for your lusts") yet these poor women brought money to the municipality's coffers, financing to a large extent the works of the Port of Genoa; however, the Port director, aware of their role, insults them anyway (for consistency, he says) but the bigots who hurl abuses at them are dummies, and among them, one pretends not to see that among the prostitutes on free leave there is also his wife. The song is a marvel, to which Franco Mussida and his mandolin give an enormous specific weight (Mussida, at the finale, is the one playing the Andalusian guitar solo) and the chorus (the track has a contagious rhythm) listing the various Genoa neighborhoods and what you can find in each of these (the women a bit older, the cocksuckers [I quote literally], the trans) is irresistible. Pagani told De André that once people heard it, the reaction would be: "Here comes the De André we knew again". Indeed, it's corrosive and biting in the author's best style.

Each of these tracks can be defined as world music and De André himself, attracted by this musical world, describes its potential but understands that he too must immerse himself in this world:

"It's been fifteen years we've been talking about this Mediterranean music. But where is it? I would really like to hear it! So I decided to make a Mediterranean music record myself. I put my heart and effort into it and, for once, shook off American music". (Fabrizio De André)

We are at the end of the journey, returning to the sea. "Da me riva" is brief, sharp, melancholic just enough. You have to bid farewell to Genoa, and you must do it with respect. Three minutes worth a lifetime. The circle is closed.

Ah, if you pass through Genoa, go to Boccadasse (which if you don't know it is a corner of Paradise) there's a place where you can eat well (specialty fish, ça va sans dire), it's called "Creuza de ma". So, as a final suggestion. Oh no, I forgot. Do you know Maurizio Crozza, the Ligurian comedian? The surname is Crozza, a modern modification of the archaic Creuza, meaning sea mule track. You see, evidently, his family lived in an area of Genoa like that, and they were called the Creuza. Then, over time, transformed, precisely, into Crozza.