Paolo Conte
Paris Milonga

THE REVIEW

I encountered "Paris Milonga" one October evening six or seven years ago.
Outside, it was raining and dreary, people were running without umbrellas towards houses or cinemas, in a setting worthy of the opening scenes of "I Vitelloni"... I ended up in a shopping center doing groceries near closing time. I found it lying at 12,000 lire at the bottom of old CD baskets, near the deli section.
Half-broken cover, I picked it up. I spent one of the most moving nights of my life. I had perhaps chosen it for that fantastic new wave/papettiana cover, for the presence of the flagship song "Via Con Me", the only song I knew of Paolo Conte the performer. I was completely unfamiliar with the lawyer from Asti; I didn't know I was facing the second act of the so-called "Mocambo trilogy" (after "Gelato al limon" and before "Appunti di viaggio"). I was intrigued by that year of release, 1981. What could the national scene offer me in that unusual year?
One of the sunniest certainties of the decade. A young old man of 37 who lives outside of time, for whom it is also unfair to talk about dating. His music has no temporal coordinates. Before all the Capossela, all the Cammariere, Conte forged his own style, new yet based on the classic, on tradition: in his case, the jazz-swing mythology of the first three decades of the twentieth century.

It began with the eponymous "Paolo Conte" (1975), the search for an atmosphere that wants to pay homage to the past without being nostalgic, that wants to tell the feelings of any chansonnier, celebrating a black and white Europe that smells of old drugstores and menthol cigarettes, of wild boogies and rainy loves across the border.
As always, the journey is strictly by train ("Azzurro", "Il Treno Va", etc.), if not in vintage cars like a maroon Topolino.

This time it starts with "Alle prese con una verde milonga", a majestic piece that makes the milonga a dream, the (slowed-down) accompaniment to the most evocative trips of a musician ecstatic about his own art.
We will then be taken between American ravings ("Blue Hawaii") - because the world across the ocean is not seen but dreamed of - between surreal prophecies about the female gender ("L’ultima donna") and love stories, of glances, of silences ("Un’altra donna").
"Via con me" needs no comments from me; it is a summary of many Contian thoughts, made of love and hate for roots, of abandoned and pursued affections; it is the "Born To Run" in Italian.
We arrive at the last stop, that "Pretend Pretend" which could be the accompaniment to the end credits of a late Italian comedy, with its melancholy veiled by a chorus of female voices halfway between Lili Marlene and Liza Minnelli from "Cabaret".

Just ten tracks will play, and you'll want more. I tried the other albums, the quality level is always incredibly high. The style is always homogeneous, don't imagine big shocks, Paolo Conte is not Beck. But he has such class and genius that he seems (like all our other classic songwriters, from Guccini to Bertoli) static in terms of musical innovations; in reality, he has composed immortal music, aimed at excellence, that knows how to evolve, but in a quiet and slow way, almost artisanal. Critics have definitively crowned "900" (1992) as his masterpiece. In my opinion, although this latter is a great album, it is only the culmination of a process (lasting more than ten years) of reworking this first era, the Wilsonian pursuit of the "perfect work," which nevertheless, as attempts go by, loses a bit of spontaneity and risks being misunderstood as a genre exercise. Personally, I appreciate more the latest "Elegia", released after years of silence and a confessed drop in inspiration. A bare and flawed work, but brand new, beautiful for a sixty-year-old.
But "Paris Milonga" remains my love, a treasure chest of reflected bitterness and poetry to listen to in the rain, the fingers of a man on ivory to express the warmth of an evening, a thoughtful yet never sad voice that knows how to open our hearts as soon as we go to meet it, perhaps in a café out of the center.