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Rating:
It seemed that Sanremo had divorced from a quality song-writing or from a vaguely original music repertoire, yet this year it launched Raphael Gualazzi, winner of the young section. His music evoked different suggestions; some speak of ragtime or stride piano, some of Paolo Conte, Tom Waits, or Fred Buscaglione, and one could go on with many musical analogies that seem to poorly combine with each other.
Gualazzi's music is not elusive or somehow unheard of, but certainly by listening to "Reality and Fantasy," one realizes that there's a lot at stake, with a common denominator: American music. Thus, you can find a connecting thread passing through ragtime, Tom Waits, Fred Buscaglione, and Paolo Conte (provided all these comparisons are convincing).
Raphael Gualazzi is first and foremost an excellent and imaginative interpreter, as he demonstrated in his previous album "Love Outside the Window" (2005), where his love for overseas music had already manifested with excellent interpretations of standards, famous blues tracks, and jazz, also managing to insert citations of a classical repertoire surely tied to his academic piano training (for an idea, listen to “A French Cartoon” from Love Outside the Window).
"Reality and Fantasy" features 14 original tracks, some so distant from each other that one might wonder if they are listening to the same album as the previous track.
There is some Rock: this is the case with “Scandalize Me” with its fast-paced rhythm, riffs, choral segments, and all the ingredients of an 80s hit.
There is some Pop, mind you, it's always a pop broadly filtered through the hands of jazz musician Gualazzi (and which has nothing to do with Norah Jones's jazz/pop, here there's true jazz), and it’s the case with “Icarus,” “Tuesday,” “Empty Home,” and the more well-known “Don’t Stop” (cover of the Flatwood Mac).
Other tracks like “Out of my mind” and “Behind the Sunrise” retain more strictly jazzy veins but in my opinion, remain at a lower profile, failing to take off or convince much.
I save for last those which for me are the gems of the album: the ones where Raphael sings in Italian, and I do not say this for some form of parochialism; I think they are truly the tracks that increase the depth of the album.
With “Sarò Sarai,” Raphael seems to want to dress up that "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis (I’m talking about “So What” from 1959) in poetic words, also inserting modal jazz into the range of his inspirations.
“Follia d'amore” and “Lady O” take up a jazz swing from the 30s, in a completely convincing manner, it's here that Raphael inserts the smoky American-style lyrics that have likened him to Fred Buscaglione (because frankly apart from the call to gin, cigars, “you live like this: day by day, night by night” I find nothing of Buscaglione in him).
Finally, “Calda estate (dove sei),” a leap to 20s sounds (the famous stride piano), Gualazzi in his Italian tracks is brilliant, entertaining, skillful, not trivial, he revives and renews sounds.
The title track “Reality and Fantasy” belongs to other sounds still, perhaps these, yes, comparable to Paolo Conte or Tom Waits (whose analogy perhaps also arises from the dirty and deep timbre of the vocalization characterizing the chorus), but not strictly American; from the words to the music it evokes a surreal atmosphere akin to dark cabaret and other European musicians.
He has put together a lot of music, I think that's why it's an album difficult to appreciate from beginning to end, yet overall an excellent debut album (as an author).
Hopefully, he will soon produce new work.
Thumbs up for Raphael Gualazzi.
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