Article by Umberto Scaramozzino
Around Italy there could be people close to becoming adults, who were waiting for a concert Jack White literally my whole life. In fact, his last appearances in our country date back to 2008, when he played in Turin and Ferrara with his The Raconteurs to promote the album “Consolers of the Lonely”. From that moment on, the most absolute emptiness. THE The White Stripes cease to exist, i Dead Weather they snub Italy, the Raconteurs don't go back, and with the prolific solo project that consolidated Jack White as one of the greatest rockers in the world there seems to never be an opportunity to include Italy in the programmes. At least until today.
On the first day of the first weekend of the festival The First Summernow in its fifth edition Lido di CamaioreJack White finally returns to play for the fans of the country, in a form that to define as dazzling is an understatement. He goes on stage in an euphoric, almost hysterical manner, picks up the guitar and begins without any pleasantries. A guitar string jumps already in the second minute (perhaps the fault of the The Hiveswho borrowed White's equipment after being robbed of their own?) and forces him to immediately change the instrument. An unexpected event that clearly reveals the way in which this concert is conducted, in which nothing is binding and everything is permissible.
Jack's way of conceiving music is as dirty as his approach to playing it. But there is absolutely nothing negative in that dirt. Jack White places himself just outside the edges of contemporaneity, its fashions and its rules. Lives in one liminal space in which everything, rather than being reproduced or simply varied, is reinvented and redesigned according to unpredictable parameters. Unlike the corridors of the Backrooms, the irregularities of Jack White's rock and blues ensnare without disturbing.
It is not surprising that he, who is often compared to a Tim Burton character (one of Hollywood's last imaginative authors), is one of the contemporary musicians most attached to his own artistic vision. Just as a look can recall a character born from the creative mind of the director of “Edward Scissorhands”, in the same way a rock riffs he is easily recognized when he intercepts Jack White's lopsided coordinates. Because more than the genre and more than the sound, what is recognizable and essential is the vision. Everything else comes by itself, flows extremely naturally.
There is no printed lineup: the songs are announced by Jack White directly to the band, who instead of occupying the large space available on the large stage of the festival, concentrate on the center of the scene. The oblique direction of the drums, placed to the side and the proximity of the musicians transform the stage into a rehearsal room without walls. A set in which Jack White is the actor who improvises, who knows the script so well that he can afford not to follow it.
For this reason, each song proposed is as if it lives its own life and becomes unpublished, despite the great generosity of artifacts from rock history that are given to the public of La Prima Estate. Two pieces of Raconteursyou are gods White Stripes (seven, if you count the snippet of “Cannon”), while from the solo repertoire more than any other album obviously emerges “No Name”, the latest studio album that somehow shapes and concretizes the contemporary variation of Jack White's idea of music.
Because when we talk about rock and its exponents – whether high or low – we seem to be talking about prehistory, while when we talk about Jack White the connotation becomes futuristic and asynchronous? The theme shifts from the tradition of the past to the distortion of a parallel future in which rock can still be a catalyst. In which a guitar hero in a leather jacket he can still be credible at the height of his creative vitality.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
