By Francesco Ciabattoni (Georgetown University)

Enzo Jannacci’s (1935-2013) theatrical style and love for his hometown of Milan and its dialect inspired him to sing about the urban proletariat and those in the margins of society. During the years of the so-called “economic miracle” of Italy (1958-1960s), when crime appeared at once disorganized and romantic, Jannacci was both a talented cantautore and a histrionic interpreter, lending his voice (but also his acts on stage) to songs written by or in collaboration with other authors. Examples include the 1964 hit “Quella cosa in Lombardia,” by Fiorenzo Carpi and poet Franco Fortini, and “La luna è una lampadina” by Carpi and 1997 Nobel prize winner Dario Fo. Jannacci co-signed “L’Armando” with Fo, and gave birth to long-lasting collaborations with him as well as Giorgio Gaber, often producing “masterpieces of pop Surrealism, demented urban stories that recount the transition from the simpler, paternalistic Italy of the 1950s to the neo-capitalist country of the 1960s” (Carrera, 331).

Although Jannacci’s later output was mostly in Italian, his tragicomic and alienating style never lost the visionary and overwhelming energy that so mesmerized the public. Songs such as “Vincenzina e la fabbrica” (“Vincenzina and the Factory,”1974) employ a rather classical Italian melodic style to describe the feelings of a young woman from southern Italy working in a Milan factory. If here Jannacci exposed the jarring contradictions and hardships of industrial society in a large metropolis of northern Italy, in the walking blues “Quelli che…” he subtly mocks the indifference and hypocrisy so common among Italians. A professing cardiologist (Jannacci even had collaborations with Christian Barnard), a gifted pianist, a genius songwriter, a brilliant actor and screenwriter, Jannacci’s signature songs combine cleverness with nonsense and social critique. While jazz and swing elements are a a meaningful part of his musical style, an absurd humor and sense of bitter realism loom large, making Enzo Jannacci one of the most versatile, profound and influential authors and interpreters of Italy’s canzone d’autore.

Bibliography:
– Carrera, Alessandro. “Folk music and popular song from the nineteenth century to the 1990s” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, ed. by Z. Barański and R. West, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 325-335.

Enzo and the Gypsies (i.e. Enzo and us).

(by Michele Mozzati) [1]

In 1968, there were only two television channels in Italy, both belonging to Rai and in black and white. The flagship program during one part of the year was Canzonissima, a competition where singers had to perform a song from their repertoire as they passed from one round to the next.

Jannacci had just experienced the resounding success of “Vengo anch’io? no tu no!” (“Can I come too? No, not you!”), a sort of anthem for the rejected, the losers perhaps, a song that told the story of someone who wasn’t invited along on a trip to the local zoo, someone who nobody wanted around, who wasn’t even invited to “his own funeral.” Jannacci showed up with that song and brilliantly passed the first round, as expected. This was a miracle in itself: the dazed, awkward young doctor, king of the Milanese night scene, combining solid jazz piano and imaginative songwriting with guitar, managed to win over what today would be defined as the national popular audience of Saturday night television. There was so much enthusiasm for his move to the next round in the most watched program of the year, that his friend Fo felt the time was right and pushed Enzo to perform his ballad “Ho visto un re” (“I saw a king”), a legacy of popular theater, for the finale. The song anticipates the fables of Mistero buffo and unleashes a contagious and cheerful attack on power and those who wield it. Naturally, the Rai Board of Directors – let’s never forget the dark years of Rai when we talk about censorship – would not admit the ballad to the competition, considering it “too political and polemical.”

Disappointed, Jannacci seemingly accepted this “failure.” In reality, he launched a counterattack by performing “Gli zingari” (“The gypsies”).

This is where our true, shocking, intimate knowledge of Enzo Jannacci first begins, with a song watched on TV by many young viewers one Saturday night. His lyrics, music, and arrangement for “Gli zingari” is a masterpiece of poetry, even more revolutionary than “Ho visto un re” if you like: in its words, in its images, in the “slowness” of the music, in its intentions, in its poignant support for diversity. The lyrics are actually quite short. They tell of a group of gypsies who suddenly find themselves facing the immensity of the sea. It is an image – one of man before a Greatness he struggles to understand and that therefore possesses him – quite widespread in the history of poetry, both written and sung. We are reminded of “I pastori d’Abruzzo” (“The shepherds of Abruzzo”) by Gabriele D’Annunzio, where this impact occurs between shepherds amidst their seasonal migration and the Adriatic Sea; or, more simply, a few years later, Guccini‘s beautiful intuition in “La bambina portoghese” (“The little Portuguese girl”) which contrasts the fragility of a little girl playing on the beach with the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. But the great strength of “Gli zingari” lies not only in the sea’s impact on “quella gente ridotta, svilita” (“those reduced, debased people”), but in the fact that the sea interacts with “proprio loro, gli zingari” (“them, the gypsies”), as if it were the only one who can understand them. And then “parlò, ma non disse di stragi, di morti, di incendi, di guerra, d’amore, di bene e di male… non disse… lui li ringraziò solo tutti di quel loro muto guardare” (…) “e diede al suo corpo un colore anormale di un rosso tremendo, qualcuno a star male, qualcuno a star male… questo fu quando gli zingari arrivarono al mare” (“it spoke, but it didn’t speak of massacres, of deaths, of fires, of war, of love, of good and evil…it didn’t speak…it only thanked them all for their silent gaze” (…) “and its body took on an abnormal, terrible red hue, someone feeling bad, someone feeling bad…this was when the gypsies arrived at the sea”).

In the age of the internet, it’s quite easy to listen to this song once again and understand how, forty-five years ago, one could live reality with courage and poetry.

The song, needless to say, did not win. It might have come in last in the final round, but that “someone feeling bad,” suspended there, has remained inside us forever.

2. Enzo and Us (i.e. Enzo and the “gypsies”)

And so we truly met him, Jannacci, almost by chance. Between the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, we spent years with him in a kind of symbiosis; the anecdotes are a waste as they cannot be shared with outsiders: madness only occurs among madmen. I lived nearby, and perhaps Enzo, Dr. Jannacci, having returned from the United States after a period of apprenticeship on various medical teams, appreciated my ability to treat him as a “normal” person, forcing myself to forget the enthusiasm of being able to spend time with him in real life, a true privilege. We convinced him to go back to playing football, and he became a solid wing-back on the glorious Radio Popolare team (he called it the Banda Popolare, with which we participated in the “Information Tournament,” a sort of high-end corporate championship between all the news organizations.

He convinced us, in exchange, to become karate students. Jannacci was our instructor as a well-respected second dan. We formed a group of almost fanatical initiates – in reality 50% fanatics of Enzo’s karate, and 50% of the outings following each lesson, with Giorgio Gaber and company. As you can imagine, it was a one-of-a-kind moment for us.

In those years, before we had even met him in person and then in the years that followed, we were madly in love with this artist who was capable of writing hundreds of songs, telling the story of the left-behind, the defeated, the marginalized with a unique mix of irony, sarcasm, comedy, activism, drama, and depth. At times he could be heartbreaking. Like every true comedian, he cultivated a sense of tragedy. He knew how to speak in hyperbole. He used allegories, exaltations, aggravations. Colorful and almost never didactic images, Picasso-style brushstrokes, Pollock-style sketches; but also Boccioni‘s Milan on a motorbike and Sironi‘s still images of the suburbs. He practiced the “verisimilitude of non-truth” by replacing reality with spectacle. He taught us to distrust those who speak only in clichés or acquired certainties. He made us willing participants in his disorientations. Of course, no one else, much less us, could ever do quite what he did. He had the gift of always knowing how to move a little further from the lens so as to stay out of focus. As only great figures can manage to do, his audience (which might be his partner in a chat, or an entire audience at a show) always thought they understood him, thought they knew what to expect from him, and yet he was already somewhere else. And he amazed us with a pirouette, often a somersault from a standing position. His artistic schizophrenia even infected certain moments of his daily life, and this made him unique in real life as well. It is incredible to think of the amount of amazing portraits this poet – an indispensable interpreter of Milan, a city-metropolis, a “middle ground” – has given us. The Milan that grew with Jannacci, and by extension with all of us, is a metropolis that must be able to accept and even encourage with moral and cultural enthusiasm its unique geographic location that makes it a crossroads between the Mediterranean and Central-Northern Europe. Accepting this peculiarity as a stroke of luck has saved Milan so far, whenever possible. But the journey is tiring, sometimes exhausting, and each step is weighed down with profound differences. Jannacci’s songs have helped us to understand these differences, which were originally cast as a national divide between North and South. Giovanni, il telegrafista, the telegraph operator desperate and forlorn in love; Bobo Merenda, a worker who falls in love with a contact lens “che da sé si applicò” (“that he put in by himself”), and who works in a weapons factory and wonders why those wonderful toys he builds are stamped with the words “handle with extreme caution”; Ragazzo padre, the young single father evicted from his house with his son, who hugs his child in the park to shelter him from the cold and is mistaken for a pedophile; il Dritto, the guy who plays records at parties “della casa popolare al 3” (“in Public Housing Unit Number 3”); or “Gigi Lamera “che abitava dietro a Baggio” (“who lived outside Baggio”) another unrequited lover who “ostentava la cravatta dell’Upim” (“flaunted his Upìm tie”), giving his girlfriend flowers fashioned from sheet metal. We could go on forever, surprising and being surprised each time, just as he did. Needless to say, he created what is considered one of the greatest moments of Italian music: the bearded guy in tennis shoes who climbs into the rich man’s car and looks around, touching everything, but “respectfully”; or the protagonist of “Andava a Rogoredo” (“He went to Rogoredo”), another lover abandoned by a woman in a “vestidìn color de trasù” (“puke-colored dress”), who postpones his suicide so he can collect a debt; or the loser in “Per un basìn” (“For a kiss”) who “per un basìn sarìa  andato a Como in moto poeu saria tornaa a cà a pée” (“for just one kiss would have ridden his motorbike to Como and walked all the way back”): he does manage to give someone a kiss, but of course the basìn is unwelcome and he is thrown out of the dance hall…Finally, we leave him with the bricklayer in “Costruzione” (“Construction”), an exciting invention of his friend Chico Buarque, the victim of a “white death” or perhaps suicide (but is there really much difference?) who dies (“contromano imbarazzando il traffico”, “il sabato”, “il pubblico” (“in the wrong direction, embarrassing the traffic”, or “Saturday”, or “the public”). It was one of Jannacci’s most intense performances. There are also memorable songs that do not mention individual characters, but are merely lists, and with these we are in the realm of sublime poems: go and read the lyrics or listen on YouTube to “Il Duomo di Milano” (“The Duomo of Milan”), “La disperazione della pietà” (“The desperation of mercy”), or the various reworkings of “Quelli che…” (“Those who…”; this last stroke of genius was inspired by a poem by Jacques Prévert, discovered and rewritten various times by an equally unforgettable figure of Milanese culture of those years: the writer and journalist Beppe Viola, Enzo’s eternal friend). As teenagers we were particularly fond – for objective reasons – of “Un foruncolo” (“A pimple”), another song in defense of losers and written with Dario Fo, in which we were complicit in the anguish of watching a pimple grow – “o forse un orzaiolo o un patereccio” (“or maybe a stye or an abscess”) – with the inescapable knowledge that “la mia ragazza non ama i foruncoli, né gli orzaioli e forse, neppure i paterecci” (“my girlfriend doesn’t like pimples, nor styes and maybe, not even abscesses…”).

Jannacci, Dr. Vincenzo, also known as Enzo, had a great ability to live his intellectual life in the most “pop” way possible. From a “sophisticated” freejazz pianist, he easily transformed into a coarse dive-bar singer, going on about girls and Milanisms (“’sto Rivera che ormai non mi segna più” [“this Rivera that no longer scores a goal”]), and immediately afterwards he’d start talking with the same passion (that taste for the absurd, that disorientation!) about politics, medicine, karate or twelve-tone music. He had invented a language that was visual, spoken, sung and played “in fits,” which allowed him to communicate – when he was calm – with extraordinary impact and immediacy. At times when we talked ourselves to death over politics, due to the difficulty of living as “organic intellectuals” (a film from those times comes to mind: Lettera aperta a un giornale della sera by Nanni Loy), Jannacci was often and willingly one in practice. That is, he knew how to be avant-garde without losing what back then we called “the masses.” Here’s how…

3. Enzo and the people (i.e. Enzo, us and the package)

It was 1980, the period in which we worked “as a hobby” at Radio Popolare. That’s where many of us got our start and where everything began for us. We were about to abandon our old jobs as employees for good to become freelance writers, especially comic writers. During that time, Maurizio Costanzo had founded a newspaper for the Rizzoli group, a popular English-style one which he called L’Occhio (The Eye). In our satire block on Radio Popolare we had decided to imitate that initiative by inventing L’Orecchio (The Ear), the antithesis of L’Occhio, also because it was meant to be listened to and not read. We were missing an acronym, so naturally we asked Enzo for one, as he was supportive of us, of Radio Popolare, of everything that went against the official information sources. Jannacci was finishing an LP (back then they were still vinyl) that was to be called Musical, named after the title of the album’s most beautiful, the most important song (“…tu che non parli nemmeno se putacaso domani ci chiudono tutta la fabbrica, mi guardi come si guarda un parente e mi dici ‘questo è il momento del musical’” [“…you who wouldn’t sat anything if tomorrow they happened to close down the whole factory, you look at me like you’d look at a relative and say ‘this is the moment for the musical…’”]). We knew it was a desperate request because he didn’t have time, he was always in the recording studio. But if you couldn’t take Enzo by the head, you’d take him by the heart, and if you couldn’t take him by the heart, you’d take him by the guts… Knowing this, we took the handwritten lyrics to his concierge. We intended to call our theme song “Ci vuole orecchio” (“You need a good ear”), and in the three verses plus four choruses we tried to explain – through a sort of parallel between society and the music world of music – how difficult it was culturally, humanly and politically to play the role of the intellectual and get one’s message through to the people. Our belief was (and fortunately still is) that the best thing in life, for an artist or an intellectual, is knowing how to do things in as intelligent and as “cultured” a way as possible without losing contact with reality: that is, to make yourself clear when you meet your neighbors at the baker’s… The text we gave to Enzo: seven rhyming sections with an instrumental saxophone solo while the musical arrangement goes in the opposite direction and “chi perde il ritmo si deve ritirare, non c’è più posto per chi vuol far da solo” (“whoever loses the rhythm must retreat, there is no room for those who want to go it alone”). Later on, precisely because making oneself understood is the most difficult thing of all, very little of this rant – basic and avant-garde – reached the people who decreed this little song a success, as it became a hit a few weeks later. The song was catchy and fun. Of course, because Jannacci set the theme song to music, and he liked it so much that we couldn’t use it for our show: he wanted it for his album. In fact, it became the title of the 33 rpm that came out shortly thereafter. Seven rhyming verses for a concept that can be summed up in eight words: “bisogna avere il pacco immerso dentro al secchio” ( “you’ve got to immerse your package in the bucket”). Here Jannacci added this simple phrase to our refrain, interpreting with a single line/image all the infinite convolutions of our attempt…A true Genius. What distinguished the indomitable Maradona from the trusty water boy Salvatore Bagni is exactly this thing. The latter – meaning us – was a good and honest footballer, while the former was the greatest number 10 in history. Why? “Perché ci vuole orecchio, ma soprattutto bisogna avere il pacco immerso, intinto dentro al secchio. Bisogna averlo tutto, tanto, anzi parecchio” (“because you need to have a good ear, but above all you’ve got to immerse your package, dip it in the bucket. You have to have it all, a lot, a whole lot”).

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[1] This article was first published in Il Fatto Quotidiano (Monday, 8 April 2013) and is now also available on the author’s blog. Michele Mozzati, writer and screenwriter, usually signs his works with Luigi Vignali (Gino & Michele). In this text he mentions the socializing and friendship between the musician and actor Enzo Jannacci and himself, along with his entire small group of friends and collaborators.