Paolo Conte at 72, over the years, his gravelly timbre has prompted no end of comparisons with those North American singer-poets Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. But the Italian’s intricately arranged music is sui generis, blending elements of vintage jazz and blues, echoes of Neapolitan songs and the cerebral charm of the very finest chansons. Alongside the surrealist wit, there is an earthy quality.

Paolo Conte: Italian Lawyer Turned Singer

Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen-like artist makes first appearance in London in almost half a decade as CD Psiche is released
London Sunday Times

Clive Davis
May 31, 2009

Along a backstage corridor at Berlin’s Philharmonie, the 1960s period piece that stands close by the neon glamour of Potsdamer Platz, one of Paolo Conte’s saxophonists is warming up with that classic of bittersweet nostalgia, September Song. 

The melancholy strains drift above Conte’s husky voice as he sits, cigarettes and wine close at hand, reflecting on the path he has followed from provincial obscurity to Europe’s grandest venues. 

Later that evening, the audience fell instantly under the spell of this most unassuming of performers. The atmosphere was even more electric at the Barbican on Monday, where his band, a peerless collection of multi-instrumentalists, delivered one of the concerts of the year. Making his first appearance in London in almost half a decade, the singer-pianist judiciously mixed old favourites with impressionistic pieces from his new album, Psiche. Not forgetting, of course, Via con me, the quirky song of love and seduction that has long been his signature tune. 

While Italian expats inevitably formed a large contingent of the sellout crowd, Conte also has a devoted British following. His voice remains as hypnotic as ever. Over the years, its gravelly timbre has prompted no end of comparisons with those North American singer-poets Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. But the Italian’s intricately arranged music is sui generis, blending elements of vintage jazz and blues, echoes of Neapolitan songs and the cerebral charm of the very finest chansons. Alongside the surrealist wit, there is an earthy quality, too, reflecting his roots in the rural landscape around his home town of Asti. “Women can sometimes be bad-tempered/Or perhaps they just need to pee,” goes one line in his much-loved song Bartali. Few songwriters could get away with such a Chaucerian sentiment. 

At 72, Conte could be forgiven for preferring to look backwards rather than forwards. Photographs tend to portray him as a stern and aloof figure, but, in the flesh, he is genial and mischievous. He has the relaxed manner of a man who has only just entered middle age, and he is not interested in standing still. Indeed, Psiche is as adventurous as anything he has released in the past 30 years. Conte’s passion for New Orleans melody and exotic metaphor still burns bright (the French love him so much that his lyrics are studied in schools alongside the likes of Apollinaire), but on this project his faithful musicians are set against a delicate backdrop of electronica. To listen to gently insinuating pieces such as Berlino or Intimita is like catching glimpses of statues in a dense, drifting mist. "I’d always felt before that electronics sounded fake", Conte explains though his translator. "But in the neutral sound the musicians created, I found some poetry. Of course, you have to still be in charge, to dominate it somehow. You cannot obey its rules."

It’s a great pity that the disc fails to include translations. Yet even when read in English, many of his compositions leave fans groping in the dark. You do not need to speak Italian to love Conte’s work; all you really require is a taste for the unexpected. As a jazz lover, in fact, he has long nursed a passion for English, a language he does not speak. Many a listener has puzzled over why he added the cry "Chips! Chips!" to the chorus of Via con me (it seems he just liked the sound the words made). The new record even includes an eccentric number, Silvery Fox, sung in a precarious but loveable approximation of the Bard’s tongue. As Conte admits: "If I could pronounce English properly, I would love to sing more in it, because it’s the most musical language of all. It has musical accents and short words that fit together better. It’s like elastic. Italian might be better for opera, but not for rhythmic music." 

His infatuation with the sounds of the pre-war era dates back to a childhood lived in the shadow of Mussolini. Conte’s father, a lawyer and amateur musician, was a passionate admirer of American popular songs, as was the boy’s mother. During the reign of Il Duce, however, American imports attracted official disapproval, especially if they had an Afro-American tinge. A standard such as, say, St Louis Blues might only slip through the censor’s net if it was rerecorded by an Italian band under the title of Le Tristezze di San Luigi. Conte’s parents nevertheless got hold of contraband discs. Their son grew up with melodies of jazz all around him. Deciphering the lyrics was no easy task. "I probably never really understand the words " just a few phrases here and there." He says. "But being ignorant of the lyrics was also something positive. It left us in a more mysterious realm. It was more dreamlike." 

In that respect, his British audiences now find themselves in the same position. Talking to him, you sometimes get the impression that Conte himself does not fully understand where his imagination is carrying him. On-stage, he seldom speaks except to introduce members of the band. Faced with an interviewer and a tape recorder, he can be every bit as reticent. As he says: "It takes me a long time to understand where the emotions of my songs come from. I might even die before I know." It is only when conversation moves to another of his great loves " painting and drawing" that he grows more talkative. 

Now that he is a living legend in Italy, garlanded with awards and literary prizes, it is difficult to believe that, for the first part of his career at least, he made a quiet living as a lawyer. Having inherited his father’s vocation, he spent years combining legal practice with a nighthawk existence as a jazz musician, playing vibraphone and piano in local bands. In the late 1960s, he was drawn to the gritty school of songwriters then emerging in Italy. Indeed, one of his best-loved tunes, Azzurro (Blue), first became a hit for the pop heart-throb Adriano Celentano. Over time, Conte, who still lacks a certain confidence in his voice, finally found the courage to perform his own songs. By the early 1980s, his fame had spread to France, where some listeners detected parallels with the late Georges Brassens, that unpretentious chronicler of love, sex and death. Conte himself has long admired Charles Aznavour, to the extent that he describes the 85-year-old Frenchman as the singer he has in mind when he is working on a new tune. 

Latin-American music is another key influence. Many of his records evoke the sensual rhythms of the tango or its precursor, the milonga. On one of the gems he performed in London, Alla prese con una verde milonga (Dealing with a Green Milonga), he explicitly namechecks the Argentine singer Atahualpa Yupanqui, an artist he routinely describes as "a god". And on the new album, he plunges into a tango rhythm on Ludmilla, a manic love letter to a circus performer that is delivered with all the sardonic fury of a Brecht and Weill morality tale about the lure of female flesh. Yet for all his love of the past " he regards the 1920s, an age of fevered experimentation in all the arts, as his true spiritual home" Conte creates music that is utterly contemporary. He is a man of quiet passion, not pastiche. 

Psiche is out now on Wrasse Records 

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6381247.ece
 

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