When the word “The End” appears and the body of the gangster lies immobile banned by a police officer and the woman who sacrificed himself for him, a melodious and slightly melodramatic theme starts, full of an impossible romanticism perhaps because he is denied by death. It is theEpilogue musical thought by Piero Umbiliani for the film by Siro Marcellini The Law of Gangsters. Since music changes meaning in relation to the context, more than half a century after that same theme sounds much more sweet and indeed its notes shine as reflections on the sea in a song by Joan Thiele. It no longer accompanies a death scene, but the “kisses of salt between the sails” who exchange two lovers.
Gangster eyes is one of the songs of Joanitathe album that Joan Thiele built keeping references to our musical past, personal stories, contemporary cades. It is the Italian album of the moment and takes a different path from the approved one of today's Italian pop. Umilian's choice was strongly desired. In addition to immersing yourself in the world of the soundtracks of the Italian and 70s Italian films, Thiele worked in Rome in the studies of the musician who passed away in 2001. He was one of the greatest Italian composers of functional music, creator of a style that mixes high and low, written music and lounge, art and crafts. The directors went to ask him for films and he pulled them out of the “book” in which he collected the compositions he wrote continuously, and then adapts and rearranged them.
It all started with a dream and is appropriate given the dreamlike dimension of certain pieces of Joanita. Thiele literally dreamed of making music with Umbilians and after writing it on Instagram he came into contact with the daughters of the musician Elisabetta and Alessandra, who were renovating his father's study. Thanks to them, Thiele entered that study, put his hands on the composer's instruments, chose passages of his soundtracks to be resounded, still others leaned them by bringing to his songs the recovery of those music already started years ago thanks to the reprints, to the revival of the lounge (“I don't even know what it is”, said humilians), to the interest of niche for the library music, at the work of music 35 caliber, which among other things are present in the soundtrack of the documentary of a couple of years ago Piero's touch. The thousand lives of Piero Umbiliani.
The disk with the soundtrack of The Law of Gangsters It explored with Twilight on the seawonderful composition for classic guitar also ended up in a scene of Ocean's Twelve With Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones. If Lil Yachty used it years ago as a sound embellishment of Concrete gooniesa piece on bitch false as certain bags by Gucci, Thiele uses it in Sunset As a surface on Cu sliding on thoughts of love, of a love you want and at the same time you would not want. The softness of Face of a woman It is used in the versions for various tools designed by Umiliani to build another song from the maritime setting that seems to float gravity. As in a magnificent hallucination, Rhythmic momentpiece of humilians taken from a record of Musical effects That is, deliberately abstract and adaptable music to various contexts, it is championship and relocated in a placid noon on theBlue waterbetween bodies wet by the sun and eternal sea. It's all magically present, almost palpable.
It took three years to get there. When he was to conceived his first album in Italian, in practice a restart, Joan Thiele went in search of his sound and his way of producing songs. Found both in the study and creative recovery of the Golden Age Of our film music, a heritage that is ours and we recognize it as such, without knowing it thoroughly. And you hear it throughout the album, not only in the four pieces inspired by Umiliani.
“Jazz with its international language is part of our era such as electricity and aviation,” said the composer of Mah-nà mah-nà At the beginning of the 1950s to defend the use of music considered at the time of little Italian. Today one could say the same thing as hip hop and in fact Thiele and his collaborators recover certain sounds and atmospheres as producers struggling with rap bases would do, that is, recontextualizing them. They do it in a record that is played, but that has nothing of a retomaniaco or pastista. “I tried to relocate these music in the present,” says Joan. “It is a record that also talks about the past and takes things from the past, but relocating them to the present, to give life to the music and my emotions today”.
The result of this double dialogue with the past, on the one hand the stories of life and on the other the film music, is a disc that resembles a hallucination suspended in a time that is this but may not be, a Mediterranean mirage, a dream in balance between the essential and instinctive language of the contemporary and the elegance of a time that will no longer return. More than regret it, that time, it is worth using it, take back what it is ours, with style. It is a disk of images, not very narrative and very cinematographic, with the guitar sounds trembling with certain western and airy melodies used with the lightness of one that can sing “hey caballero” without embarrassment. It is a dreamlike space in which to project yourself with imagination.
“In the world of light music, the song is like a dish and arrangement is its condiment,” said Umiliani. Joanita It is also a record of beautiful arrangements and interesting stamps, and today it is not obvious, in short, there are the dish and the seasoning. Here the music are as important as the words, another rare thing in pop Italy in which everyone sing and few play. It is an album with a precise aesthetic in which certain images chase each other from one song to another, a disc-mundo that listened to from the first to the last minute, when finally the grandmother's dedication appears for the “pazzerella mia”.
Joan says he has heard “the need to reconnect me to the instinctive character, to the urlo of the girl who in Desenzano del Garda played the Led Zeppelin in the attic and dreamed of making rock star”. In some of these songs I also hear a kiss on Joan's forehead to the youngest Joanita. As in a challenge in an OK Corral inner, the references to the soundtracks of the old western, the Twangy stamps, the “bang bang” from a fireground of fire seem to evoke a duel, with the bad ones who threatened the dreams of yesterday's girl taken to revolve today by today's woman. Perhaps Joanita It is also a record on the desire to become what we dream of.
Even when Joan Thiele tells not easy family stories like in Echowhen in Kiss on the forehead sings of a father who “did to not feel anything”, when he evokes strong emotions such as the anger of Poisonthe tone is never shouted, the exhibition is never shameless, it always remains a margin of mystery. It's not all clear, it's not all explicit, this is a record that feels emotionally before even understanding it rationally. It is fueled by the tension between said and unspoken, among the dialogues of the singer -songwriter with herself and music that relocate these stories in a luminous and satisfying aesthetic frame. And as in certain films, in the end the good ones win.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
