Conte Dautomne

Paolo Conte is the most internationally successful of the Italian singer-songwriters who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. He is also among the most idiosyncratic, eclectic and unusual exponents of what Franco Fabbri has defined as the canzone d’autore (author’s song). Nonetheless he remains a rather arcane, cult figure in the Anglophone world – an example of what Simon Frith has called ‘the unpopular popular’. A combination of apparent opposites – the provincial and the cosmopolitan – his music appropriates a global sweep of influences without being definable as ‘world music’. Characteristics of both his rough, untrained singing style and wry, ironic and opaque compositions have strong affinities with US singer-songwriters like Tom Waits and Randy Newman, and he draws heavily on early American jazz influences, although he remains quintessentially Italian. This makes him difficult to categorise in the world music market.

Paolo Conte - Psiche
Italian singer/songwriters | MP3 @192 kbps | Time: 0.50.26 | 70 MB
Genre: Jazz/Pop | Album Studio

Psiche is the 13th studio album of Paolo Conte's 35-year career. Not exactly prolific, the former lawyer from Asti built an outstanding body of work between 1974 and 1990, but recorded sporadically after that. Like João Gilberto or Jimmy Scott, Conte is one of those artists who very early on created a unique style and persona, and never strayed too far from with it. Psiche thus resembles all of Conte's releases since 1992's 900: a set of 15 unimpeachable new songs that perpetuate the myth of Paolo Conte, but add little to it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and Psiche is indeed a fine album. True, some may write off this record as an exercise in style. Yet style has always been exactly Conte's forte, and no one can possibly deny that he has it in spades. Old themes and characters are revisited (the theater, dancing, bicycle racing, fascinating women, European culture, American swing) and set to Conte's trademark smoky jazz ballad treatment. Perhaps the most distinctive element of Psiche is the abundant use of synthesizer sounds ("Il Quadrato e il Cerchio," "Bella di Giorno," "Omicron"), particularly as it comes on the wake of the acoustic return-to-roots implied on Elegia, Conte's superb 2004 album. The results, if not as individually memorable as those of the preceding album, give Psiche a sonic identity of its own that grows with the record. He may be past 70 and starting to show in his voice, but Paolo Conte remains a class act.

[From this exceptional event, of enormous historical and performative proportions, the documentary film "Paolo Conte alla Scala, The Maestro is in the soul" was born.
The historic concert is both its predominant fulcrum and a pretext to enter the soul of the Maestro, observe him behind the scenes and during rehearsals, and question him in his relationship with music and musicians, with words and his passions. The voice of today's Maestro then mixes with that of the young Paolo Conte, through repertoire images from the family archive that tell "under the stars of jazz, how much night has passed".

The Italian guitarist and bandleader Nicola Conte has recorded his first album for the legendary, recently re-established MPS records. Conte has brought with him his cosmic-cosmopolitan ensemble of stars which includes trumpeter Theo Croker, saxophonists Logan Richardson and Magnus Lindgren, and singer Zara McFarlane. For the most part recorded in Bari, Italy and Johannesburg, South Africa, it is a sensitive work of art that crosses the border between soul and spiritual Afro-jazz.Nicola Conte has cast his vision of cosmic jazz into a seamless tonal design – without restricting his players' freedom, leaving them open to the influences of the diverse cultures.