•
Rating: Hello guys, after a few days of break, here we are again to resume our adventurous journey into so-called "minor" Italian music, this time going back in time to the mid-60s, with a guide like the great, and today somewhat forgotten, Fred Bongusto (b. 1935).
A singer with a seductive voice, who stands out in the lower tones and is distinctive for being almost tainted by a few too many cigarettes, a refined composer capable of blending Latin melodicism with echoes of jazz and swing, the Molise-born Buongusto is considered one of the pioneers of the so-called "confidential" subgenre, that is, music played mainly in nightclubs, piano bars, and generally in small circles, often characterized by sentimental themes - almost designed to encourage meaningful glances and rubs between the patrons of the venue - and by a subtle vein of melancholy, not lacking, for this reason, a disenchanted and ironic view of the world.
Bongusto appears, to me, as the perfect interpreter of a certain (neo) Italian bourgeoisie of the years immediately following the economic boom, wealthy and forgetful of the tragedies of war and poverty, seeking affirmation and social recognition, replicating in a modest, but no less brazen way, the comforts, and quirks, of a certain international jet set: from the new model sports car, to vacations in the most exclusive rivieras and islands, passing through tennis or endless evening challenges, between gin and mosquitos, at poker and baccarat.
In Bongusto, there is a description, sometimes explicit and sometimes just suggested, of the comforts in which the invariably male protagonist of each song moves, a narrating 'I' who gets now full of himself, now dull, lost in the fogs of the nightclubs, in the summer settings where he stands out as an ineffable "tombeur de femmes"; however, it is accompanied, almost as an underground and recurring motif, by a certain fundamental gloom, a subtle awareness of the futility of the stories told, which frames the individual narratives in a key that is both poignant and - pardon the apparent oxymoron - amused, overlaying narrative directors and levels of interpretation.
Let's take from this anthology one of Buongusto's most famous and at the same time successful pieces, like "Spaghetti a Detroit": the swing jazz arrangement, the voice filtered as if from an old 1920s gramophone, provide the backdrop to the end of a love told outside the ordinary canons, where the protagonist, back in a hypothetical Italy, laments no longer eating with the taste and pleasure he experienced in the States, together with Lola, his beautiful of the moment. The interpretive register, however, does not have that melodramatic touch that may stand out in other related authors (from Di Capri to Califano), but, precisely by enumerating the typical meal of the disappointed lover, namely "spaghetti, chicken, salad, and a cup of coffee...", Bongusto winks at the listener, inviting him not to take the affair too seriously, as indeed emerges from the insistent Italian-American accent with which the name of the imaginary Detroit is pronounced, birthed by the same spirit as Buscaglione's Chicago.
In other pieces, like "Tre settimane da raccontare", the notes "Una rotonda sul mare" and "Guarda che luna, guarda che mare", describe, instead, the passing and ending of loves in a symbolic summer context: if the situation appears overused, it is here the tones of the narrative that make the difference compared to other songs of the time or later ones, almost tinting the ordinary making and unmaking of loves with vivid poetry, disguising and distorting reality to give it an extraordinary character - to tell and to sing - even when it reveals itself in all its miseries and sadness. It is, in summary, about artifices, in which all the romantic clichés are emphasized, and at the same time demystified, as they function to adorn a simpler truth, perhaps more bitter than that fabricated by the fervor of sentiment.
In tracks like the equally known "Balliamo", Bongusto seems to almost guide us amid the dance floor of a floating nightclub, or a bar in the misty outskirts of some northern metropolis, describing fleeting, half-crazy, unpredictable loves, where nothing is what it seems, with a sense of precariousness and fragility. Here too, fun and leisure veil the intimate, almost existential meaning, of Bongusto's poetics, in the belief - à la Great Gatsby - that perhaps the golden age is but a myth, the antechamber of an imminent and inevitable collapse, in the face of which nothing remains but the thrill of the moment and the glances, complicit and fleeting, in the moonlight on the beach or in the glow of a lamp in the last suburban nightclub.
Ebbramente Yours,
Il_Paolo
Tracklist
Loading comments slowly
