Monday, April 09, 2007

Song of the day: "Via con me" by Paolo Conte

Paolo Conte is not a musician but a living legend and what he does is not music but true art. Even this intro should very much be redundant, but for those of you that really but really do not know Paolo Conte (sacrilege!), here's his official website and his English wiki entry, respectively. I wrote previously about my supreme top 5 of Italian musicians and mentioned de Gregori as one name there: Maestro Paolo Conte is certainly part of that top!

It is very difficult for me to choose a "one" song of the day from this great composer, pianist and singer, since I adore most of his pieces (this is not a joke!). And there are not a few: see here a discography of this prolific artist (his latest is putting together the pieces from the 2005 concert in the Arena di Verona: I can only imagine the great atmosphere with Conte singing and playing there: Arena di Verona is a miraculous place, as I had the chance to experience before). How can one not love masterpieces such as "Sotto le stele del jazz" (a great live performance from A'dam!) or "Lo zio" or "Diavolo rosso" or "Molto lontano" (with a superb videoclip!) or "Genova per noi" or Sparring Partner (here live, but the sound quality not so good; here a more 'static' version, but with good sound quality; here as soundtrack of Ozon's "5x2" - great sequence! - movie which is very high on my lost of must-see movies) or... and I have to stop somewhere because of space and time constraints (and certainly because, no matter how much I'd like that, YouTube is not really unlimited in resources)... One more thing, though: as you well know (or should know...) many very famous Italian songs (made popular by others) were actually written by Paolo Conte; such an example is "Azzurro" (written by a very young Conte), which is best know in Adriano Celentano's version, but just check Conte's own amazing "jazzy" version of that (personally I find this latter one superior to Celentano's, despite the fact that I also like the "official" one a lot- and so does Paolo Conte himself). Therefore, as you see, very difficult to choose the one piece I prefer for today (and for the last couple of days): in the end, the decision is function of my current moods. So, here we go: the song of the day is the addictive "Via con me" (superb live version from Amsterdam here; see also a more rare version here, with a perfect intro from an interview with the artist- that intro already says a lot about who Paolo Conte is!). Check out the lyrics.

Magnifico, Maestro Conte!

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