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Rating: "One day an architect who works for the City of Rome, partner of an excellent jazz musician like Nicola Stilo, gave me a CD. She knew my love for Jazz, for music, for the greatness and the suffering of artistic creation. When I started listening to the CD that had been given to me, I realized that something was happening inside me. I didn't know, I didn't know what. A strange melancholy overcame me, a sudden, overwhelming pain."
Walter Veltroni
Walter is a bumbling politician, like many of his generation, after all; but when Jazz is involved, his Jazz, the human side of Jazz, it's as if he changes his skin, and in this case, his inspiration reaches very high peaks. Moreover, it is natural to ask how the politician Veltroni and the Walter of Jazz can coexist in the same person. Mystery. Put more jazz into your politics, Walter.
The Maurizio Costanzo Show had long been removed from my personal schedule: Carmelo Bene was dead, Giovanni Falcone was dead, the voice of Pino Locchi was gone, Franco Bracardi overshadowed by Morselli and his orchestra, boys and girls from de Filippi's shows the real stars. I have a dignity to which I must respond. But that evening in 2003, thanks to a usual late-night channel surfing, I happened to make a spontaneous return to the Costanzo Show. I decide to stay on the flagship network of the Cavaliere's group. There's Walter. I still hoped Walter wasn't there to talk (?) about politics, but rather pull out of his hat some discussion related to music, but also on cinema, another shared passion. Thanks, Walter, thanks. Nothing, no politics, but a book he had just written.
There are plugs and then there are plugs: Walter talking about a book related to music is one thing, the national Vespone talking about the merry ladies who frequent the beds of power is another. There are plugs and then there are plugs, indeed. Walter begins to discuss this book, from the little parlor of the fallen nobility of the Costanzo Show. A book centered on the figure of a Jazz pianist born in Palermo in 1956 and who committed suicide in Montevarchi in 1995. In between, an heartfelt and poignant journey that will delve into the deep furrows of this young man's life; a deep uneasiness that leads to the sad end on a Spring day in March 1995. I'm interested, Walter.
I look for the book, but I can't find it. I give up. Years pass, and being often and willingly a victim of fluctuating and varied musical periods, Veltroni's book inevitably falls into oblivion. A few more years go by and, director Riccardo Milani, adapting Veltroni's book, will stage this dramatic existence of the pianist, entrusting the role of the protagonist to a splendid Kim Rossi Stuart. That film reminds me of Veltroni's book with the promise to start looking for it again. The film, "Piano, Solo", I saw it. The book, "Il Disco del Mondo", I found and read it. The sole protagonist him, the pianist: Luca Flores.
Veltroni lost his father, Vittorio, a RAI man, when he was just one year old; and this condition led him to give very touching nuances to his concept of family, and from this primary concept small and large stories shared by all can arise. Yesterday for example, I listened to him in another of his plugs, and it seems as if the common denominator of his stories is the centrality of the family. The story of the Flores family is fascinating, as Veltroni himself illustrates. Of Catalan origin, having settled in Sicily following Charles III, it included among its members a Filippo Flores, president of the Military Council that judged the Bandiera brothers. Giovanni, Luca's father, a geologist by profession, also wrote a family novel on the Flores family's saga, titled The King Does Not Respond.
Luca’s early years were spent calmly, in a cosmopolitan context that would always be the backdrop to the family's events. The father's profession led the Flores around the world until they settled in Mozambique. The mother Iolanda, a charming, cultured, and modern woman, is a figure of a modern matriarchy, who holds the material and psychological reins of the family. Luca, his brother Paolo, and sisters Heidi and Barbara grew up placidly in this protected environment, as is understood from the photos provided to Veltroni by the Flores siblings and published in the book. The same photos which, in a kind of revealing journey, from a life of ordinary daily familiarity, will then highlight vacant gazes, melancholic expressions.
This serenity disappears precisely when the central figure of the family, Iolanda, dies in a car accident in 1964. Luca was also with her on the day when the young Luca Flores gives way to Luca Flores who cultivates an elusive torment for the rest of his life. Very often, in the face of dramatic events like these, tensions begin to emerge, misunderstandings, in a game of everyone is wrong and everyone is right, and inevitably even the Flores family begins to fall into this spiral. Everyone goes their own way, always traveling around the world, and after still more wandering, Luca ends up in Florence. He begins to study privately at the conservatory, years of general ferment, comprised not only of classical music but also of Pop music like Genesis and EL&P; until another element comes into his life: Jazz.
His friend Alessandro di Puccio, along with others, will give an exciting overview of Florence in those years and deeply imbued with Jazz; an environment where Luca's name will start to circulate strongly. The path of the musician Luca Flores is strongly ascending, unstoppable, always teetering with his pain and his difficulty communicating it. In the following years, a fragile path like his had to necessarily intersect with other fragile paths, like those of Massimo Urbani and Chet Baker.
Nicola Stilo from the book: "Chet Baker, when he met Luca, fell in love with the sweet and kind person, but over time he became passionate about his way of playing, and I can dare say that in the last years, from '86 to '88, every time it was possible, Chet insisted that it was Luca who played with him". Chet's death greatly affected Luca, as seen also in Milani's film. The night flight of Luca, in one last and poignant wingbeat, will have its epilogue with his final question from a foregone conclusion... How far Can You Fly? A question that, with its music, has also touched me like Walter.
"The language of music is one, and it is that of the soul, where words deceive us with their many meanings. It is free to soar to heaven, to descend into the bowels of hell, or to remain floating in limbo. I love those musicians who sing, write, and play every note as if it were the last".
Luca Flores
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