Ivan Graziani
Firenze-Lugano no stop

THE REVIEW

Eh, yes, the Lord really made a big oversight on January 1st, 1997, when he took away Ivan Graziani, one of Italy's most sensitive and brilliant songwriters. Besides the Lord, our dear record executives also made a big mistake as they have almost completely forgotten him, if it weren't for the effort of a hard core of fans who organize the "Pigro" festival in Pesaro every year, there wouldn't even be an event or a plaque to honor his name.
And indeed, the great Ivan gifted our ears with good music over nearly thirty years of his career, starting with his beginnings with Anonima Sound in the late '60s, and his entire solo career which includes several albums that rank among the peaks of Italian music in the '70s and '80s.

An extraordinary guitarist both rhythm and lead, he is also present as a session musician in albums of much more famous colleagues (Lucio Battisti first and foremost), but also an exquisite singer with that falsetto of his which in several cases has unjustly led to comparisons with Pino Daniele (without offense to the Neapolitan, but two rather different musical styles).
Condensing all the significant tracks of Ivan Graziani into an album, even if double, is a rather difficult task, but it must be said that this double anthology succeeds quite well, containing almost all the essentials and covering his entire career.
There are also two unreleased tracks recorded in 1995, "Il lupo e il bracconiere", a rock ballad that speaks of those legends told around the fire on winter evenings and is based on a story by Gabriele D'Annunzio, and "Giuliana", a rock-blues reminiscent of Bob Dylan's "Gotta serve somebody", featuring fantastic guitar work by Ivan himself.
Then the rest. There's a bit of everything from "Firenze (canzone triste)" to "Lugano addio", from "Monna Lisa" (this one's beautiful, the theft of a painting at the Louvre Museum in Paris, with the "Parisian guard who spied on kindergarten girls now has his mouth full of museum tickets"), "Agnese dolce Agnese" (it was not a plagiarism, it was simply the reworking of an 18th-century piece, Ivan Graziani was certainly not Zucchero), "Pigro", a song about indifference, about the information we are continuously fed by various biased and sold-out news channels, the real information we seek ourselves otherwise we will remain increasingly ignorant, "Fuoco sulla collina", musically fantastic, a dream characterized by great guitar solos, the piano-centric "Ballata per 4 stagioni").

I wanted to only mention those that strike me the most, although I am sure I have forgotten something small. Three tracks, however, I will not omit.
"Navi", with a title that evokes the artist's name spelled backward, which is probably the piece that most closely aligns Ivan Graziani with Lucio Battisti, with those splendid openings in the chorus; "Doctor Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde", one of my favorite Italian rock pieces, great guitar riff and amazing central solos; "Signora bionda dei ciliegi", a memory of a distant love and initiation into sex, a song full of specific references and evocations ("the cold soda glass in hand").

It is high time that this great artist be once and for all remembered and re-evaluated for what he was worth. A lot!