Mia Martini, a woman not to forget

That one would gladly give away a pile of new records in exchange for another little of Mimì. If only they could beat up to listen to his suspended projects: the songs with Pino Daniele, with Mina, an album dedicated to the moon, the tribute to Tom Waits, another to Billie Holiday, the one on which he was working and passed in his headphones when he left thirty years ago, alone, after trying to reach the phone. Because Mia Mia Martini left many songs, but, unlike what happens normally, the most unforgettable are those of the return, with which it raised after long silences and dark periods. He came back, and he was bigger than when he disappeared. He sublimated the suffering through music, that is, the way to transmit them all.

He called himself Mimì Berté

It works like this since she was a young girl. He calls himself Mimì Bertè and sings the yé-yé, but then he ends up serving four months in a prison in Sardinia for possession and drug dealing. Thirty -five milligrams of hashish, in practice a correct cigarette, in a countercultural 1969 in which the walls also smoke. At night, in the cell, Mimì sings. He pushes out the soul of Etta James and Aretha Franklin, and the inmates are listening to her. He is then acquitted, but the experience deeply marks it. He earns something by working on the crochet, he takes advantage of it to change the name when the founder of Piper discovers it: Mia, like Farrow, Martini, like the most famous Italian brand abroad. She is no longer the carefree screaming, she starts again with “Really Father”, a desecrating invective, very felt by her that her father, described as violent, has not seen him for some time and has grown with the four women of his family. The song wins the avant -garde music festival and new trends in Viareggio, is in a disc entitled “Beyond the hill” (five songs are written for her by Claudio Baglioni, who also sings in the chorus of “obsessions”), where we talk about jail, suicide, generational conflict, religion, topics that trigger censorship. Discussions with the record company are added, the rejection to participate in the Sanremo Festival. So what does Mimì do? He reacts with “Little Man”, “Woman”, “Inno”, “Minuetto”.

It is 1974 and the European press elects the singer of the year. They have succeeded not without contractual and criminal tribulations to pay, but that voice is amazing and shortly after Charles Aznavour wants it with him to the Olympia in Paris. In France they compare it to the Piaf. Mimì, however, does not like sparkling, the distance from the public, and renounces continuing the adventure. Starts again. “From Capo” is a hidden pearl written for her by Riccardo Cocciante. Mimì sings: “The heart makes a noise mess, I will know how to start again. “I give up abroad Also to fully experience the sentimental and professional history with Ivano Fossati, who blossoms in “dance”, an inspired album that contains “the construction of a love”. Ironically, it is precisely the love that destroys it. Intense and tormented relationships. “Inside my collection of loves with short legs “sings De Gregori in” Mimì will be “.

When he changed his voice

She struggles, between women’s problems and artist problems, and the voice, by protest or by spite, gets sick in the late 1970s. It undergoes two surgical interventions. It remains silent for a year. His instrument changes, the voice is now roca, less soft. Mimì retires? On the contrary. In 1982 he participated for the first time at the Sanremo Festival, with “And he doesn’t end the sky”. He interprets it so well that journalists must invent the critical prize. They establish it on purpose for Mia Martini, in fact today it bears its name.

Here, his name: it is a terrible chapter of his human story. For some time someone has lavished himself in Farneticazioni: Mia Martini brings Illa. It looks like a joke, instead it is a persecution. Superstition becomes ostracism. If they invite you to a festival, colleagues retire. From the broadcasts they erase his songs. To every unexpected, “it was the one there”. The unnameable. More guilty than those who generated this slander, it is those who believed it. And there are many. To the point that Mimì can no longer bear the environment. “It is an impossible wind on these wooden sails ”, therefore nEl 1983 retires to the Umbrian countryside. His is not paranoia. As proof, the superstitious Sanremese jury does not select “School my heart”, written for her by Paolo Conte, not such an unforgettable song if Miriam Makeba and Dizzy Gillespie have redone it. Mimì, landed, disappears for seven years. Seven long years to keep his voice for himself, between depressive collapses and afternoons on the piano, to play the Brandenburg concerts.

People are strange

In 1989 we find it at the Sanremo Festival. It starts again, bringing a song written in 1972 by Bruno Lauzi and Maurizio Fabrizio. It is the right time to interpret it. Now that he has touched the bottom, his blues is to the stars. Renato Zero says he has personally guaranteed for Mimì, if his presence had collapsed the Ariston theater. It makes you laugh, if it were not that it makes more infuriate. She gets on stage, rises on “At least you in the universe”, applause are scrub. And yes, people are strange, first hates you and then loves you. Behind the scenes there is Fabrizio De André who waits for her to embrace her. Supports it. Faber is moved every time Mimì refers his “Hotel Supramonte”.

From there to follow Martini puts “the snowfall of ’56”, “men do not change”, “Cu’mme” with Roberto Murolo and Enzo Gragnaniello, “Rapsodia” (which is positioned fourth at the Eurovision). The last album is “The music that turns around me”, reinterpretation of songs by artists he loves, a bit like he had done with “travel companions”, expressing gratitude towards all -round music. The last powerful TV image is from April 1995: Mimì and a young Giorgia dive together on “And then”. And then.

A great loneliness

Mimì was a great solitude that reached the multitude. “THEMusic is the real reason for my existence, “he already said to Bagnara Calabra at eleven, where he was born in 1947 and where his wife, mother, any profession except the prostitute and the singer, was more appropriate. And this anticonformism, now that Mia Martini is perceived as a classic, forgets too often. The themes he dealt with were brave: “free”, “but what love” (written by Antonello Venditti), “I woman, I person”, “portrait of a woman”, “woman”, “tears”, all on female emancipation; “The Virgin and the Sea” on a rape; “Butterfly men” on homosexuality; “Prisoner” on prison. We forget that it was appreciated from Japan to Canada, who sang in German, French, Spanish, Greek, reported the Neapolitan song in the standings, fell very well in the Roman one, see “You may give many cortelas” with her sister Loredana and duets with Gabriella Ferri (we recommend seeing the special “Mia” by Enzo Trapani, 1974), sang the Mediterranean. We would be wrong to forget that he was an ironic, witty person, with a thunderous laugh, as who knew it. The fact is that the maximum intensity she reached her when the sun did not beat. “This cuttlefish black that turns off the stars one by one” sings in “dark” (written by Mimmo Cavallo), which now appears in an intriguing version on the “Tarab” album, collected with some old unpublished and alternative interpretations of well -known songs rearranged (with the artistic production of Maurizio Piccoli).

Achille Lauro, at the presentation of his latest album, said: “Mia Martini for me is perhaps the biggest thing ever happened in Italy”. Let’s remember it like this. The bad luck is not the one that Mimì brought but the one he had. And no, he is not the artist who ended up early, he is the artist who has always started again.