Una Stagione al Mare Paolo Conte

Paolo Conte - Arena di verona [Live]
Italian singer/songwriters | 2 CD | All Covers | MP3 VBR ~ 226 Kbps | 187 MB
Genre: Jazz-Pop | 1h 35m 57s | 2005

Biography by Mariano Prunes
One of the most idiosyncratic, charismatic, and internationally successful Italian singer/songwriters of the past four decades, Paolo Conte created his own unique style, combining a love for jazz and music hall together with a weary yet sympathetic and humorous understanding of human foibles. Born to a well-to-do Asti (Piedmont, Italy) family in 1937, Conte began to learn the piano at an early age, together with his younger brother Giorgio Conte — who would also become a famous songwriter in his own right — at the insistence of their father, a distinguished notary but also a passionate jazz amateur. Following in the family's footsteps, Conte became a lawyer and practiced the profession until well into his thirties. Contemporaneously, he played the vibraphone in several local jazz bands.

Paolo Conte - Un Gelato al Limon
Label: RCA Records 1979 | MP3 192 kbps | 51.9 MB
Gernre: Jazz/Pop

While his first two superb albums, released in 1974 and 1975, failed to gain widespread popularity for Paolo Conte, his reputation among Italian songwriters kept growing steadily. In the meantime, Conte spent four years away from his solo career concentrating on other projects, but finally made the third time lucky with 1979's Un Gelato al Limon. The album's success was undoubtedly boosted when Lucio Dalla and Francesco de Gregori performed the title track in their mega-tour, as documented by the subsequent live album Banana Republic. The same year, Enzo Janacci included two other Conte originals from Un Gelato al Limon on his album Fotoricordo. Musically or lyrically, there is little in Un Gelato al Limon (or in almost any other Paolo Conte album, for that matter) that was not already present in the first two records. In fact, the new batch of material is, if anything, less consistently excellent than those of the previous releases. Several of the songs feel like rewrites of older ones, something that would become a constant in Conte's career. This is perhaps hardly avoidable for a songwriter like Conte, who has always concentrated on a fixed set of themes and characters, such as provincial bourgeois boredom and vaudeville artists, and the particular world they inhabit. At any rate, any Paolo Conte effort is a most enjoyable affair, and Un Gelato al Limon is no exception. Two of his best-known songs are here, the title track and "Bartali," two trademark Conte snapshots of watching life passing by through the slow Italian summer, with its scant spectacles and consolations – a fleeting (probably illicit) love affair and bicycle racing, respectively. Another colpo di genio is "Dal Loggione," one of those Conte songs about the love of music, a subject that allows him to sound more genuinely sincere than steeped in character, as is usually the case. As if to signal his entrance into star status, Un Gelato al Limon is the first Paolo Conte album to feature his photograph on the cover. Of course, he is shown against the darkened stage of a shabby nightclub, with the locale's bar counter featured on the back cover. A man and his world, indeed.
~ Mariano Prunes

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.

Greatest Hits collection by the famous Italian singer and songwriter. If you never heard about Paolo Conte you have to listen to this disc ;)