Mauro Pagani, 80 years old today: best wishes!
Mauro Pagani turns 80 today (best wishes!), born in Chiari in the province of Brescia on 5 February 1946: his life as a musician was told in the book “Nine lives and ten blues” and in the film “Andando dove non so – Una vita da fugasco”, which I saw last night at the Anteo cinema and which I will report to you in a few days.
Summarizing in a playlist the multifaceted and broad musical activity of the violinist, flautist, bouzoukist (can we say that?) and multi-instrumentalist, arranger and producer, is a difficult task, so to write this greeting card I did not take into consideration the albums recorded between 1972 and 1975 with Premiata Forneria Marconi, starting instead with his first solo album, “Mauro Pagani”, released in 1978, by from which I took an instrumental piece: “The aromatic city”
and continuing with the album “Carnascialia” (1979) a project that saw Pagani, Demetrio Stratos and the Canzoniere del Lazio together, from which I propose “Kaitain (22 October 1962)”
passing through an album, “Rock’n’roll exhibition”, recorded almost casually, which documents an almost improvised concert held in 1979 at the Massimo theater-cinema in Milan in the first months of 1979 in which Pagani, Demetrio Stratos, Paolo Tofani and a group of friends pay homage to the music of their beginnings, as in this “Hound dog”:
and for a little-known and very elite project, that of Alia Musica, in whose album “Cantigas de Santa Maria” (also 1979) Mauro participated:
It can be considered Pagani’s second solo album, the one with the soundtrack of the theater show “Sogno di una notte d’estate” by Gabriele Salvatore, released in 1981, from which I chose “One (Quasi)”
while a pure divertissement was the adventure of Figli di Bubba, a semi-demented group born as a joke and landed at the Sanremo Festival (the line-up, in addition to Pagani, includes Franz Di Cioccio, Roberto Manfredi, Roberto Gatti, Alberto Tonti, Enzo Brasci, Sergio Vastano). They also released an album, “Essi”, in 1978, and went to Sanremo that year with “Nella Valle dei Timbales”.
In 1983 the soundtrack of the film “Dream of a Summer Night” was released, with more songs than that of the theater show
“Creuza de ma” is from 1984, the album co-written by Pagani with Fabrizio De André
and in 1990 Mauro wrote the music for the album “LeCloud”, also by De André: here “Ottocento”
You have to reach 1991 to find Mauro Pagani’s second solo singer-songwriter album; it’s called “Passa la beauty” and from the album I chose “La neve de Natale”
In 2003 “Domani” was released, his third album as a singer-songwriter, from which I propose the title track (which will then be taken up again in 2009 by the supergroup “Artisti Uniti per l’Abruzzo”)
and in 2004 “2004 Creuza de ma”, a solo revival of the album with De André and with three unreleased songs, including “Neutte”
In the documentary mentioned at the beginning, the upcoming release of a new solo album by Pagani is anticipated; for the moment the latest solo work is the single “The Big Man”
