Paolo Conte also reminds me of my dad. He looks nothing like him, and likes his cigarettes whereas my dad was a stalwart pipe man, but there is that same golden, verging on auburn, Sunday autumn morning melancholy about his bearing. But 2004’s Elegia album feels like the expression of an encroaching melancholy from which there is no return; although he turns seventy this year, it still seems premature to view Elegia as his last word, since his partial Montreal doppelganger Leonard Cohen remains firmly productive fifteen years after recording “Waiting For The Miracle.” But there is a sense of deep hurt and loss throughout the recital, words about wanting to be hugged and held if he can’t get his music back, wondering what he would do if he lost it. In a lot of ways he is what Serge Gainsbourg might have turned into had he survived to seventy and developed a mournful perspective on his life and the world, physical and aesthetic, which ensured his birth. I am sure that Conte, as with Gainsbourg (and Van Morrison), had his youthful ear firmly cupped to the steam radio, waiting for AFN’s Stars Of Jazz to filter through the static; Bird and Diz, Miles and Sonny, an escape from his banal surroundings, even though he remains a citizen of his original birthplace of Asti.
Some of Elegia is typically very funny, including the marvellous “Frisco” where he lopes along, semi-drunk, valuing the Bay as an ancient wonder more precious than Memphis or Luxor while his band warm up on some old Don Redman charts behind him. But most of it seems to find him retaining only the scarcest hold on life, his world and sanity. “La Casa Cinese” – “The Chinese House” – is a comparatively miniaturist piece but in its stark abnegation of wonder is as bleak as anything on the current PJ Harvey album. Over doggedly anchored piano and double bass he looks at the man – or is it a mirror image of himself? – “searching for a street…here’s a naked soul...” while the chorus is an agonised, gravelly hum soundtracked by a poignant, Carla Bley-ish clarinet top line. “Just what are you searching for over there? There’s the Chinese house…painted blue…”; the lyrics are helpfully printed in French and English in the CD booklet as well as the original Italian, so I must point out the subtle reference to “Volare” which his performance gives in that “painted blue.” At the “blue” a sudden avalanche of agitated strings makes itself known before dying back down, receding into the darkening gloom (“This darkness doesn’t help/If anything, it forgives us…”). He wonders how much the changes in his life have negated, or strengthened, his original desire (“Memory is enchanted/Yes, that’s what you want…/Thoughts that no longer apply/Have you changed them? I don’t know”), but finally knows that the Grail he seeks has long since vanished, or possibly never even existed: “You’re asking me about a street/Anything you like/But the Chinese house/That you won’t find.” Or, translated into a chant I used to hear in my Glasgow youth all the time: “If you’d’ve been where I’d’ve been you would’ve seen the Fairy Queen!” And then Gauguin’s Nevermore. The piano steadily winds the song down like a music box coming to the end of its programmed pirouette; has he the energy to wind it up again? At my dad’s age, I think I understand the feeling now.
Some of Elegia is typically very funny, including the marvellous “Frisco” where he lopes along, semi-drunk, valuing the Bay as an ancient wonder more precious than Memphis or Luxor while his band warm up on some old Don Redman charts behind him. But most of it seems to find him retaining only the scarcest hold on life, his world and sanity. “La Casa Cinese” – “The Chinese House” – is a comparatively miniaturist piece but in its stark abnegation of wonder is as bleak as anything on the current PJ Harvey album. Over doggedly anchored piano and double bass he looks at the man – or is it a mirror image of himself? – “searching for a street…here’s a naked soul...” while the chorus is an agonised, gravelly hum soundtracked by a poignant, Carla Bley-ish clarinet top line. “Just what are you searching for over there? There’s the Chinese house…painted blue…”; the lyrics are helpfully printed in French and English in the CD booklet as well as the original Italian, so I must point out the subtle reference to “Volare” which his performance gives in that “painted blue.” At the “blue” a sudden avalanche of agitated strings makes itself known before dying back down, receding into the darkening gloom (“This darkness doesn’t help/If anything, it forgives us…”). He wonders how much the changes in his life have negated, or strengthened, his original desire (“Memory is enchanted/Yes, that’s what you want…/Thoughts that no longer apply/Have you changed them? I don’t know”), but finally knows that the Grail he seeks has long since vanished, or possibly never even existed: “You’re asking me about a street/Anything you like/But the Chinese house/That you won’t find.” Or, translated into a chant I used to hear in my Glasgow youth all the time: “If you’d’ve been where I’d’ve been you would’ve seen the Fairy Queen!” And then Gauguin’s Nevermore. The piano steadily winds the song down like a music box coming to the end of its programmed pirouette; has he the energy to wind it up again? At my dad’s age, I think I understand the feeling now.
