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Paolo Conte, Elegia (WEA International)
Time Out New York Review

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Listening to cabarettista Paolo Conte’s Elegia is like exploring a bombed-out belle époque hotel, with gold dust, decapitated cherubs and scraps of brocade dotting the rubble. Conte’s timbre is beyond tattered, and his notions of pitch and phrasing are highly personal. The result is an album of insane beauty and solemn eccentricity from the former lawyer turned Italy’s most inventive songwriter.

The old wolf invokes the hated nickname “Frisco” in a honky-tonk tribute to Sodom by the Bay, which he likens to Babylon and a gaudy divan. In “Chissà” (“Who knows”), he spins a pensive meditation on indecipherable languages and lost souls, only to whip up the raunchiest of rumbas in “La nostalgia del Mocambo.” The title cut showcases Conte’s gift for luminous but oblique lyrics (all translated in the CD booklet): “I had a passion for music/Rusty/Blackish, hot-painted with soot/Metropolis!”

The self-proclaimed world’s greatest kazoo player here limits himself to piano, with a strong group of sidemen: Claudio Chiara (sax) and Daniele dell’Olmo (guitar), who slither their way through “Sandwich Man”; and Massimo Pizianti, whose clarinet licks and bandonéon doodles fire the “boundless eroticism” of “Il regno del tango” (“The realm of tango”).

The album’s final cut, “La vecchia giacca nuova” (“The old new jacket”), is a tripping, surreal tune that Nino Rota might have penned, studded with nonsense syllables and gaily soured arpeggios. It tells of a once-new garment that, magically, grows more splendiferous with the years—rather like Conte himself.

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