Ivano Fossati
Musica Moderna

Like a great chef.

What can a great chef do who has invented some wonderful, sublime dishes, always delightful, but no longer has ideas, despite a sublime technique and unchanged abilities?

What can this great chef do, if not try to make his great dish the best he can? To create, as no one else would know how, his own masterpiece?

Fossati is now a great chef. His career has been wonderful, varied, heterogeneous, experimental, deep, sometimes seemingly easy, other times hermetic yet still very comprehensible. He played with words and chords like the best chef of chords and words.

He has pushed his capacity to invent and reinvent, to reinvent himself and recreate himself, beyond his limits. And, more or less after the sublime "La Disciplina Della Terra" and "Not One Word", he realized that no, new ideas just weren't coming anymore. And it wasn't his fault. The quest, the "never settling", characterized his entire career. It was natural, human, even beautiful that he reached an affectionate "point of no return" from which the Artist could do nothing but look back, finding himself, recognizing himself.

And that's what he did: the latest works echo the past without mimicking or repeating it. They taste of old and new. They are philological (auto-philological, and sometimes self-quotational) and intimately beautiful. And this "Musica Moderna" is the shining jewel. The egg perfectly in the basket.

Here the writing of the lyrics reaches truly high literary levels, as hadn't been read, or heard, since "La Disciplina", if not since "Macramè", and the music regains the guitarlike freshness, rock, pop, reggae of the golden years. However, as I said, without any mimicry and with no easy choices.

From a musical technical standpoint, several features in this record are striking, repeating in practically every track. Certainly, the melodic structuring repeated perfectly harmoniously and not "studiously", across multiple keys, with a fascinating ebb and flow of highs and lows. Again: past recipes, but perhaps never cooked so well.

Then, the perfect sounds of drums and percussion. And guitars. Ah... the sounds of the guitars... Wonderful, pleasing to Marc Ribot and Tarantino. Perfect in counterpoints as well as in accompaniment "sound beds". Fossati's relationship with guitars is peculiar. The love, a total and overwhelming love, ends after the "Vol. 2" live to make way for the completely unbridled, melancholic, and highly structured harmonic piano inventions.

Then, more or less at the time of the single "Time And Silence", a beautiful guitar comes back into the picture, in a long solo and in accompaniment. Then Ivano will stand again, in concerts, guitar over his shoulder.

Beautiful. Very beautiful. To look back, to love for what it is, and to develop in this way is simply beautiful. And this record, here and now, can only be considered a masterpiece.

The usual dish, but never, really never, cooked so well.