Giorgio Gaber
Io non mi sento italiano

THE REVIEW

I remember it very well. We were celebrating. 2002 was leaving to make way for 2003. On such occasions, everyone is caught up with bubbles, cotechino, some with fireworks. Or with the soundtrack, the red lingerie, the right red wine to accompany the main dish. All fundamental things. And the day after, the new year, you wake up late, have a big lunch with a thousand leftovers from the day before. Everyone around the table with the happy dark circles of New Year’s Eve. Anything can happen, in those wonderful and utterly silly days. Anything, but Gaber must not die. Yet, that year, a treacherous fate delivered us such a gift. Sudden and cruel. One consolation...: a new album was coming out. Just a few days later. The album, therefore, is not some posthumous operation. It’s not the sordid rehashing of leftovers by wives and record labels that we witness today with increasing dismay and amazement. It is a new album. Wanted, thought out, and conceived by Mr. G. Our beloved Mr. G. A consolation. Tiny and perhaps insufficient. But still a consolation.

With a circular structure typical of the greats and perhaps simply of fate, Gaber returned to the pure song form a couple of years ago. “La mia generazione ha perso” came out in 2001, and like this one, it combined old and new writings, and some old ones retouched. I like to think of these two albums as an ideal double, the double return of Mr. G. to his old love. To that song form that made him famous and was always his ideal dimension. Like...: Gaber without theater...? Sure, it might seem a contradiction. A self-imposed limitation. But it is not: Gaber's songs live wonderfully even on their own. They are autonomous and beautiful worlds, refined and meticulously crafted. They are adult entertainment, a rare commodity perhaps now extinct or nearly so. If once they were performed in theater by the author (and, please, not by others...), then they could live a new life, renewing and enriching themselves. But this was the fruit of a genius plant. Not a score for academy students.

Returning to the albums, only a small great difference separates the two works of the “return to song”: in the first album Gaber worked in the studio with others. In the second, already afflicted by illness, he delegated much of the work to the excellent Beppe Quirici (already outstanding elsewhere, for example with Fossati), following everything step by step from afar, from his home. The same home where he recorded the vocal parts, with that deep, warm, wise, intelligent voice of his. That voice that lost nothing over the years. On the contrary: if possible, it became even more beautiful. Here, as always, a tedious and highly subjective track-by-track analysis is unnecessary, just highlight some highly admirable new pieces (“Il tutto è falso,” “Io non mi sento italiano”) and a splendid spiritual testament, of infinite wisdom and relevance: “Non insegnate ai bambini.” It would be nice to reproduce the beautiful text in its entirety. But I think you already know it, or are willing to retrieve it quickly. Do it: it can only enrich you.

Gaber, like the few greatest geniuses of our thought, culture, and music, was incredibly ahead. Or, given where we have arrived and where we are going, incredibly elsewhere...?