DallAmeriCaruso: the film about Lucio Dalla on TV this evening
It airs this evening, December 26, on Rai 3 at 9.20 pm, DallAmeriCaruso on film by Walter Veltroni released in theaters last year. The concert documentary recounts an important period in the career of the late Bolognese singer-songwriter who saw him intertwine his story with that of the very popular tenor and with the United States. The docu-film also contains images of a Dalla’s legendary concert at the Village Gate in New York in 1986which were thought to be lost.
The story
We are in thesummer of 1986. Lucio Dalla has just returned to Italy after a trip to the United States which saw him tour North America, starting from Canada, in the company of his musiciansall traveling on what the gang had dubbed the “Springsteen bus”. “America was our Mecca for us. We were an Italian band that proved that Italian music wasn’t just spaghetti and mandolin. Today I would say to Lucio that he was more American than the Americans: a musician who more than anyone personified the emblem of the American musician, capable of mixing tradition and innovation“, tells Gaetano Currerimember of the band that accompanied Dalla in that experience.
On the bus we played music, played cards, watched Ridley Scott films, to ease the tension of the performance that the singer-songwriter from Bologna was due to give shortly thereafter on the stage of the Village Gate, the temple of international jazz in New York : “.Lucio was intimidated by the American public: he didn’t know what to expect“, remember Ricky Portera. THEThe concert will be a success and a live album will be released, entitled “From America”. However, things go differently than Lucio expected. The record companies ask Dalla to find an unreleased song that can drive album sales. But the new thing isn’t there. It will arrive completely randomly. It’s magical.
In that hot summer of 1986 Dalla decides to take some friends, including them Angela Baraldiand to go and spend a few days there Amalfi Coast. It’s going through the Gulf of Sorrento with his boat, renamed Catarrhwhen suddenly the vehicle breaks down off the coast of Sorrento. Having broken down, the vessel is towed to shore. Dalla and Angela Baraldi don’t know where to lean, however. They find a room outsideHotel Excelsior. The only free one: the one where Enrico Caruso had stayed in 1921. According to the legend told to Dalla by the hotel bartender at the time, Angelo Leonelli, the great tenor, ill and at the end of his life, had fallen in love with a young woman to whom he taught music in that hotel in Sorrento. In the room there is still the piano played by Caruso. And it is precisely in that room that served as the stage for that lasting love (whether true or legendary), that the “castaway” Lucio Dalla composed a song capable of holding together its pop imagination and the best melody of the Neapolitan and Italian tradition: “Caruso”.
The movie
In his film, Walter Veltroni brought Angela Baraldi back to the chamber of magic after almost forty years (thirty-seven, to be precise). Baraldi is moved as she relives the moments in which as a spectator she witnessed the genesis of the song: “I can still see him, Lucio. Sitting at the piano, with his back turned. I remember his hands moving across the keyboard”, says the singer. In the film the audience finds the objects and thoughts of those days. “I believe everything is written before. May each of us have our own destiny. Even songs: they have destinies equal to those of men”: Lucio Dalla responded thus to those who asked him from which magical alignment of the planets and stars one of his most famous songs, if not the most famous of all, was born.
“Caruso” in 1986 allowed the singer-songwriter to sell something like 9 million copies all over the world, later seeing one of his songs become a classic sung in the following years by Céline Dion, Michael Bolton, Julio Iglesias, Andrea Bocelli and even Luciano Pavarotti. “.For three days I heard the story of the tenor, who was in love with his young singing student and how, on his deathbed, a voice so powerful had returned to him that even the lampara fishermen heard it and returned to the port to listen to it. ‘Caruso’ was born like this – he said of the song, which came to life in a few minutes – if my boat didn’t break down between Sorrento and Capri and if I didn’t call a friend to tow my boat… And if this friend of mine hadn’t owned the hotel where Caruso died… And if he hadn’t given me Caruso’s room… And if I hadn’t made three notes on Caruso’s piano… And if the bartender on the cliff hadn’t told me the story of Caruso falling in love with this young girl… Well, I believe that songs also have destinies equal to those that men have”.
The album
But beyond the enchantment of the fascinating story of “Caruso”, there is more in “DallAmeriCaruso”. Walter Veltroni’s docu-film brings the full footage of Dalla’s 1986 concert at the Village Gate in New York to the big screen in 4Kwhich was directed by Ambrogio Lo Giudice, were almost entirely lost, now found, restored and remastered in Dolby Atmos. A film to listen to and singin short, which recounts the American journey, for him a point of arrival and at the same time the opportunity for a new start that will lead him to write one of his greatest masterpieces. The concert was also released in physical format, double CD, double black vinyl, colored version of LP (exclusively for the Sony Music Store) and in Dolby Atmos, also the live album – already released digitally – “DallAmeriCaruso – Live at Village Gate, New York 03/23/1986”. The physical versions also contain three texts written by Walter Veltroni, Ambrogio Lo Giudice and Lorenzo Cazzaniga. The Dolby Atmos version also contains the same “Caruso”.
This one tracklist of the album:
DISC 1 – “Organized trips”, “L’ultima luna”, “Anna e Marco”, “Tutta la vita”, “If I were an angel”, “Cara” and “Washington”.
DISC 2 – “The Evening of Miracles”, “Balla Balla Ballerino”, “Tango”, “Ask Who the Beatles Were”, “Futura”, “Star of the Sea”, “The Year to Come” and “4/3 /1943”.
