The 70 years of Ivano Fossati, an insatiable "explorer"

- Advertisement -

On September 21, one of our greatest songwriters will turn 70. The story of an artist to whom many great names in our music must say: Thank you.

Ivano Fossati was born in Genoa, one of the historic Maritime Republics. Beloved Genoa that Fossati once defined bony, methodical and sulky. Genoa, capital of Italian songwriting, the city of Fabrizio De André e Luigi Tenco, of Gino Paoli e Umberto Bindi, of Bruno Lauzi e Paolo Conte, born in Asti, but Genoese by adoption. Ivano Fossati immediately had the sea in his eyes and in his heart. That infinite space that could allow you to dream of any company, to reach any place only with the imagination. To explore is the verb that embodies the character of Ivano Fossati.

Exploration as a continuous search for new things to know, to understand, to make them your own, retouching them, reshaping them according to your own nature and sensitivity and then, perhaps, throw them on an immaculate sheet of paper to create a new song, a new masterpiece , remaining, however, always insatiable to continue to explore, incessantly.

Son of "That place in front of the sea”, Which a few centuries earlier inspired a man named Christopher Columbus to explore distant lands, which smelled of America, Ivano Fossati, like all the young people of his time, grew up steeped in rock music, Rolling Stones need Eric Clapton. Slowly he moves away from it to enter a more intimate, introspective world, where his music docks in ports with Mediterranean sounds up to the far and far East.

CAREER

The rest was done by his imagination and his incredible musical talent. At sixteen he decides to drop out of school, the call of music is too strong and cannot go unheard. There is no money, he only has a guitar and a great desire to play. Study, play, study again. His virtue as a multi-instrumentalist comes to the surface more and more. Keyboards, transverse flute, guitars, piano now belong to his technical background.

By recycling objects of all kinds he began to create improbable amplifiers which, however, had the great merit of starting to spread a voice that after over forty years of career has made him an icon of our music.

Ivano Fossati wrote for himself, but he wrote a lot for others. For at least a decade before starting his solo career, he wrote songs for many big names in Italian song. The female universe has plumbed it flawlessly and some masterpieces successfully interpreted by our greatest performers bear its trademark at the bottom.

Some examples:

Loredana Bertè - Dedicato - I'm not a lady

Patty Pravo - Wonderful thought

Anna Oxa - A little emotion

- Advertisement -

Mia Martini - And the sky does not end

Fiorella Mannoia - The nights of Mayor - The steam trains

And then again Mina, Ornella Vanoni, Alice. Extraordinary collaborations with Francesco De Gregori e Fabrizio De André.

The meeting with Fabrizio De André

Ivano Fossati and Fabrizio De André met on a train that would take them from Genoa to Verona for the Festivalbar. A chat to start weaving the web of a possible, possible future collaboration. About fifteen years have passed since that meeting on the train when, around 1990, they reunited. The opportunity was provided by the new De André album, Clouds, where the two Genoese songwriters write the lyrics of two songs in Genoese dialect together: Megu Megùn e To Çimma.

This brief collaboration is only the prelude to that of a few years later which will lead to the creation of one of the most extraordinarily poetic albums in the history of Italian songwriting, but also a work that has always been created, always and in any case, in an obstinate and opposite direction, borrowing the words found in Unbounded prayer. We are in 1996 the two meet again and begin a difficult path: write an entire four-handed workthe. Later Ivano Fossati will write: "While writing, a poetic is used but one is not aware of making an effort to search for words. It is working with someone else, as happened to me with Fabrizio De Andrè, that you realize what you are doing, because you look at each other, you compare ideas ".

Souls Hello

Souls Hello it is the last work of Fabrizio De André, who will die on 11 January 1999. It was, without knowing it, his will and for his last artistic journey Faber found in Ivano Fossati an extraordinary companion. Released exactly 25 years ago, on September 19, 1996, Souls Hello was designed, planned and built as a concept albums, or rather like an opera where all the songs are linked by a very thin but evident thread. The Salve Souls are the "different", the eternal "minority", the one who lives on the margins of the so-called civil society and who lives separated from the "normal".

And so it is told of Princess, the life of a transsexual who ultimately makes a "Milan lawyer”Which represents that civil society that has excluded it or of the Roma people in Khorakhané. Two songs that are a punch in the stomach against prejudices and false moralisms. Disamistade e Unbounded prayer they do not need any comment, it is only necessary to listen to them, because they are simply two masterpieces where the words of De André and the music of Fossati manage to produce a magical synthesis. And then again there is Souls Hello, the manifesto song of the opera. It is sung in two voices, with De André and Fossati alternating the stanzas, now one, now the other. The emotional impact is very strong, the content devastating.

Discography of Ivano Fossati

A thought by Ivano Fossati

“We have gone from the centrality of music to the fact that it has become the fuel for mobile phones. We listened to things carefully, discussed each other, learned to dream or reason. Just like reading a book. There was no difference between immersing yourself in literature or music".

Article by Stefano Vori

- Advertisement -