Paolo Conte: Italian ‘Arthouse Exotic’

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. Popular, classical, exotic Piedmontese cantautore (singer-songwriter) Paolo Conte has been lauded in Italy for the distinctively broad global focus – what Paolo Jachia has called an ‘exoticism’ and ‘a search for elsewhere in the texture of the everyday’ (Jachia 1998, p. 102) – in his urbane, sophisticated, jazz-oriented songs, which often explore the dilemmas of characters who are in imaginary flight from the everyday. But despite his long-term acclaim in Europe since performing at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in 1984 he has only relatively recently, in his late sixties, begun to receive recognition in the UK and the USA. After his 1998 USA tour, Rolling Stone designated his album The Best of Paolo Conte ‘essential listening’ for that year, and Robert Christgau listed it in his top 100 albums in Village Voice. Conte’s eight-city sell-out tour of the US and Canada in 2001 consolidated this acclaim. Ranked by Jachia as one of the two ‘major figures of the contemporary Italian music scene’ (along with Franco Battiato [ibid., p. 100]) and highly regarded in Europe for his suave performance persona, droll humour and songs suffused with pre-1920s-jazz influences, Conte is an undiscovered treasure for many Anglophone listeners, despite the fact that a number of his songs are either partially in English or are peppered with (often nonsensical) English phrases. His