Gino Paoli, unforgettable voice of Italian song, dies

BarcelonaItalian music has just lost one of its most outstanding, prolific, and veteran voices, that of Gino Paoli, who died at the age of 91 in Genoa, the city where he had lived for decades. The long career of the musician and singer-songwriter, born on September 23, 1934, in Monfalcone—in the Friuli region—began in the late 1950s with a simple, elegant, and autobiographical song. The cat

Paoli, who left advertising design and painting for music, repeatedly stated that "the perfect song is one in which the chemistry works." In the early 1960s, during his romantic relationship with another renowned singer, Ornella Vanoni –dead just four months ago—, Paoli wrote some of his most emblematic compositions, among them Senza fine and Il cielo in una stanzawhich Mina popularized. "When our love affair erupted, Gino was married and I would marry shortly after," Vanoni recalled. "We experienced it with great suffering, more than as a scandal."

Love, tragedy and politics

1963 was one of the most important years in Gino Paoli's career and life. Professionally, because he released another of his most emblematic songs, Sapore di salewritten the previous summer on a Sicilian beach, just before a concert. Personally, because it was the year he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the heart. "Suicide is the only arrogant way man is given to decide for himself. I am proof that even in this way you cannot truly decide," he said shortly after surviving. At that time, Paoli had released two LPs and a ten-line stanza of singles and had participated in the 1961 San Remo Festival with the song A living man, performed by Tony Dallara.

Sapore di sale would end up being part of Paoli's third LP, Basta chiudere gli occhi (1964), the beginning of a second and long creative phase that lasted for more than five decades in some thirty albums and included great hits such as Che cosa c'è, A man worth, A che cosa te siervo madre and And days without youPaoli was much more than one of the most important and respected exponents of Italian pop music. Besides bringing singers like Lucio Dalla, Fabrizio de André, Ornella Vanoni, and even Zucchero to the stage, he paid tribute to Joan Manuel Serrat on the album And blond traffic light non dream God (1974) and also reimagined his repertoire in a jazz style on albums such as Milestones (2007) and A meeting in jazz (2011), which led to the Barnasants festival in 2012"Jazz is imagination, fantasy; you can have a song structure, but it will never be the same. That's what makes it fun and what I'm passionate about," he said at the time.

Gino Paoli was also distinguished by his political commitment. In the late 1980s, he was included on the lists of the Italian Communist Party and served as a senator for this party for five years, during which time he released albums such as The ufficio delle cose perdido (1988) and Matto eats a cat (1991). "Love is like air, it's the same path, a feeling capable of generating both attraction and repulsion," Paoli stated in 2015. "It's not easy to write love songs. I've had many partners, I've been married three times, and I still know very little about women." He tried to decipher it, or at least add some nuances, with his spontaneity and delicate songbook.