Zucchero
Blue's

THE REVIEW

Purists, sticklers, and musical hardliners may well turn up their noses and, if they really have time to waste, insult malignantly, but beware, this is no laughing matter. The young man from Emilia, born in Roncocesi, Reggio Emilia province, in 1955, after a couple of successes that might not have been entirely clean ("Donne" and "Rispetto"), decided to play offense, and, predictably, he managed to hit the mark perfectly.
Assisted by an array of top-notch collaborators (Wayne Jackson, Corrado Rustici, Gino Paoli, Pete Townshend, Memphis Horns, Dodi Battaglia, Luis Luciano) Adelmo Fornaciari, aka Zucchero, creates what, beyond any obsessive prejudice, can be freely considered his most crystalline masterpiece: "Blue's".

Fine and exquisite album, elegant and delightful: the blues, or rather, our own homegrown blues, at the highest level. Zucchero is in top form, and he proves it right away with the famous "Con le mani" (Gino Paoli co-wrote the lyrics), while with "Pippo" he unleashes his irrepressible soul (the chorus is memorable: "Pippo, che cazzo fai / Pippo, oh no / Pippo, che pesce sei / Pippo, anche lei").
Then come the earworms: "Non ti sopporto più" and "Senza una donna" will bounce like oat flakes on all the beaches of Italy during the scorching summer of 1987 (in Liguria, where I usually go for summer vacations, believe it or not, everyone was humming them a bit). Additionally, the captivating "Hey Man" stands out, as does the libidinous "Solo una sana e consapevole libidine salva il giovane dallo stress e dall'azione cattolica". But Zucchero can also be introspective and whispers, almost timidly, the story of a journey within love, "Dune mosse" and the faint and graceful little story of a somewhat shocking childhood, "Bambino io, bambino tu".

Zucchero sings beautifully (try listening to this album again and then, right afterward, listen to "Zu&Co", notice the difference?) and the music, fascinating and delightfully groovy, tends to emphasize, but without overdoing it, the solemn and almost epic rhythm of this eclectic top-charting album (by the way, four months at no.1 on the charts). Zucchero transforms the blues, he doesn't try to copy it, he attempts to rewrite it, paying homage to the great fathers of American soul blues (Aretha Franklin, the usual borrowings from Joe Cocker) but, kindly, he avoids paying homage, for the umpteenth time, to Piero Ciampi (the temptation will still be very strong, and in "Oro, incenso e birra" he'll fall right into it). And in the end, almost to thank the audience, he decides to sing "Hai scelto me", a little over two minutes for a final, exceptional stroke of genius: combining blues with pop (a highly successful endeavor, by the way).

Someone might say that Zucchero is a charlatan, that he doesn't understand a damn thing about blues, that he would do better to stay at home and wallow in billions. And in part, you are also right. After "Blue's", and the masterful "Oro, incenso e birra", traces of Adelmo Fornaciari have been indelibly lost (someone says they saw him again, almost a year ago, in Rome at Live8). Amid "Miserere", a watered-down funky (the billion-dollar one of "X colpa di chi?") and an endless array of duets and duetlets (Miles Davis, Sting, Eric Clapton, Pavarotti, Laura Pausini, Tom Jones, Sheryl Crow, Paul Young, Francesco De Gregori, Jovanotti) very little remains of the Zucchero blues man of the late eighties, only a few isolated flickers here and there. Perhaps he really would do better to stay at home and drown in billions, but how many millions of Italians decide that, given the heat and the collective breakdown, it's time to buy garbage like "Il grande baboomba", well, what can I say, it's enough to make you long for the times when everyone went crazy for "Pippo" or "Diavolo in me".

Maybe it wasn't blues one hundred percent, but it was emotion, rhythm, fun, carefreeness, professionalism. And today, thanks to a famous law called the law of retaliation, it's up to us to be able to, and have to, sing to him: "Non ti sopporto più.... davvero".