Nanni Svampa
W Brassens!

"If you good folks like coming to the theater, I'll keep making songs: I don't need anything else; if you don't like them, I'll put them in the drawer and return to the hammock to enjoy my nice little dreams."

If you good folks like coming to the theater, I'll keep making songs: I don't need anything else; if you don't like them, I'll put them in the drawer and return to the hammock to enjoy my nice little dreams- from "Tromboni della pubblicità")

Georges Brassens and Nanni Svampa.

With his poetry and irony, the Frenchman has been a beacon for many Italian singer-songwriters for decades. The Milanese is one of the last remaining singers of a city that has traded survival for its identity.

Their artistic encounter began in the sixties when the young Svampa became interested in the musical plots of the Sète songwriter, who died in 1981; already in 1964, he released the album Nanni Svampa canta Brassens with Durium

In the following decades, the Milanese singer-songwriter ventured down various paths: he was one of the flagbearers of the nostalgically remembered Gufi; in the seventies he published the extraordinary Milanese. Antologia della canzone lombarda in twelve LPs; he finally gained a mocking fame as a tavern songster (although Le canzoni dell'osteria, a 1999 release - the same year as the album under review - deserves more than a jovial and - why not? - melancholic listen).

But the love for Brassens never waned: in 1971 Nanni Svampa canta Brassens was repeated; in 1977 Cantabrassens was included in the collection Cabaret italiano. Not to mention the numerous performances of the Frenchman's songs in concerts. In 1999 this little-known W Brassens! was finally released, which is a vivid recording of this concert activity.

W Brassens! consists of seventeen tracks (plus the instrumental divertissement of Sala buia); the adaptations by the Milanese singer-songwriter are distinguished from those of other colleagues - from the little-known Beppe Chierici to the overexposed Fabrizio De André - by the almost total use of dialect and a perfect recontextualization of people, places, and events, generally in the city of Milan. And so the tender Margot becomes the spirited Rita from the Ortica district, just as - to use the same example Svampa highlights in the album - the marché de Brive-la-Gaillarde becomes the Porta Romana market.

The result is surprising: if one were to forget the title for a moment, one might almost swear that the songs sung by Svampa were born in that form and to describe the atmospheres they narrate.

Thus, not only are various themes present in Brassens' songs preserved, but they are also made authentic for the Italian listener: the infidelity of El temporal (L’orage in French); the nostalgia for the past in the already mentioned La Rita de l’Ortiga or in I mè moros d'on temp; life on the fringes of society, if not in the actual underworld - from the crime of I assassitt (original L'assassinat) to the bittersweet snapshot of prostitution in El rochetee (Le mauvais sujet repenti). All of this is spiced with much irony, evident in the hilarious La Cesira (Fernande) and up to the famous Tromboni della Pubblicità (Les trompettes de la Renommée) and El gorilla (Le gorille).

Even though I am not from Milan, Nanni Svampa contributes to representing, through geographical and cultural proximity, what the land I live in and feel a part of should continue to be. And the fact that this holds true even for an album that, in fact, contains only adaptations of French songs, well: it's extraordinary.

Postscript

If anyone notices that the contents of this review are practically the same as those on the related Wikipedia page, well: know that - at the time of writing - I wrote that page.