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If any artistic injustice has ever been suffered, it is certainly Umberto Bindi who has experienced a significant one. We are talking about one of the most important and influential Italian composers of what we almost disdainfully call pop music today. Because when we impress our friends by mentioning the usual names about the Genoese school - Faber, Paoli, Tenco - we always forget to talk about an artist with refined sensitivity, a true craftsman of melody and a scholar of classical music. Indeed, there wasn't just pop music in Umberto Bindi. His love for jazz and classical music led him to compose the famous Nostro Concerto, probably one of the most significant pieces of the sixties.
The year after the release of this single, Umberto appeared at the Festival of Sanremo, in the 1961 edition. The song he presented was titled Non mi dire chi sei, a delicate love song, perfectly in line with the artist's style. During his performance, he proudly displayed a ring on his pinky finger, which shifted the focus more onto Umberto's private life than on the actual quality of the song and his interpretation. That ring, in fact, sealed Umberto's romantic relationship with another man, a fact that the bigoted Italy of the time saw as a disgrace. So much so that from that performance onwards, he was kept away from any record label, as if he had the bubonic plague or, if you prefer, the Coronavirus.
Ostracized from the music world for a full 35 years, thanks to the support of Renato Zero and Ernesto Bassignano, a lyricist, Umberto Bindi made a comeback. He did so by returning to the scene of the crime: in 1996, after presenting to Baudo and the Sanremo event the song Letti, he was finally welcomed at the Italian song festival. Unjustly, he ended up last in the ranking. To accompany him vocally, both on stage and in the recording studio, were the New Trolls, an orchestral and progressive rock group from the seventies now dedicated to good pop music. That same year, the album Di coraggio non si muore was released, with the collaboration of the two aforementioned artists, allowing Umberto to release a new album of original songs after a very long time.
The result is a pearl of sensitive artistic and songwriting refinement. Umberto's interpretations are truly heartfelt and moving, and the passion seems to finally explode among the author's delicate and sophisticated notes. More than any other, in my opinion, the song Pianoforte best expresses Umberto's fragile soul: a piece dedicated to the musical instrument, the piano, with a powerful allegory to Bindi's own life, where the black keys alternate with the white ones, or rather those of the so-called "normality" to which the man Umberto Bindi never felt he belonged. Besides the already mentioned Letti, I must mention the beautiful Chiara, another track where voice and orchestra deliver an intense performance. Nonetheless, I invite you to explore this wonderful album in its entirety, capable of soothing the deafening noise that radio stations and mainstream platforms bombard us with daily.
A few years later, he would leave us, not in the best imaginable conditions. Poor and ill, his death went unnoticed, just like his life in recent years. It is up to us and our memory to honor and introduce future generations to the extraordinary artistic sensitivity of Umberto Bindi, so that his flame may burn forever and he may thus receive that gratitude and small part of justice denied to him in life.
"I am different because I live in fairy tales
and I set the shape of clouds to music
What's wrong with that? They are my evenings!"
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