Paolo Conte
Nelson

LA RECENSIONE

Here we are talking about Paolo Conte again.

It's autumn, and in my Piedmont, just like in his, the fog has arrived along with the morning chill, and the chestnuts are displayed at the greengrocer's. And soon there's the novello wine, to snub disdainfully as every year, rejecting it as something feminine. To not miss out on anything in this periodic paradise, which is indeed autumn, we've already had our first polenta with friends.

But those piano notes that have always inhabited the mists of the best years were missing. And here they are.

It starts right away, and it's his piano. His touch. And we live by sensations, and the sensation of the first notes is that of being in front of, I won't say a masterpiece (a singer-songwriter masterpiece, today, unfortunately, seems very, very difficult to me...) but something more than just a good impression. Conte, considered artistically dead after the long post - "Una Faccia In Prestito" pause, has, like a determined and perhaps lazy but undoubtedly brilliant miner, found a second gold vein. A gold somewhat lesser, a bit aged, but charming and very clever.

The old lawyer is capable of flashes and flights, of cheeky tricks and winking self-references. Of writing without genius, or with relative and fluctuating genius, yet still managing to create beautiful things. Pleasant, always high-quality, even when he allows himself to underline, in a scene almost of love, that “in the dark a fart echoes.” And this album is like that. A Conte summary. There's the Conte with voice and piano, intimate and loving (oh, let's be clear, always in the Piedmontese way, right?, so no shouts and no melodrama, never...), there’s especially the Conte deservedly considered international (here he sings in Italian, English, French, Neapolitan...). There's the very acoustic Conte and the one vaguely and delicately electronic (which is wrongly considered to have started with "Elisir"...), there’s the joke and there's the seriousness, and above all, that brilliant and foggy borderland where seriousness and joke mix, probably confusing even the amused eyes of the author himself.

And there are those charming signs of beautiful old age which are self-references, intentional as likely as involuntary, scattered here and there. And it doesn't matter that some pieces he has already written at least two or three times.

It's a cycle, essentially, all the same and all different. Even Master Federico said he kept making the same film. Everything flows well, serene, harmonious, semi-serious, all played wonderfully by the little professors who are finally beginning to “let go” (ah, age, what a beautiful thing), among the very capable pen of the Lawyer, his still swift and amused fingers, and his voice that tastes of old, of Piedmont, of France, of wine and cigarettes, and so much swing.

In short: there is Paolo Conte. And Paolo Conte is here.

And in these desperate years of cultural collapse of a country that once knew how to be great, and now is so tiny, that's not little.

Yes...: it's really nice to be seventy-four-year-olds like that.