Piero Ciampi, a new album with 32 unreleased songs

by Simona Orlando

Piero Ciampi is a labyrinth in which to get lost. You follow him and he suddenly turns, goes where he shouldn’t go. When everything seems wrong – intonation, rhyme, rhythm – then you discover he was right. He is a saboteur, the engineer of the derailment who passes through dark areas, before leaving you at the station. Or you expect him to wander, to digress, to rant, but instead he arrives straight and sweet until the end of the song. It gives the privilege of disorientation, Piero Ciampi. Even more so in this collection of eleven songs never heard before, and another twenty-one known but with variations in the music, in the subjects, in the lyrics, in the spoken words, which in his case are not details.

The double CD, released by Squilibri on November 21st, was presented as a national preview at the Ciampi Prize at the Goldoni Theater in Livorno, and is entitled “We are in dire straits”. This is the sentence he wrote by hand in a telephone book, followed by the tracklist of a hypothetical album, and obviously the address of a restaurant. It is one of the many discoveries of Enrico De Angelis, curator of the project (and of various others before it), who in the attached booklet explains the complexity of recovering and recomposing the fragments of Ciampia’s work, broken up, abandoned and resumed, covered, without date, and patiently rebuilt over the years thanks to collectorscollaborators of the Livorno singer-songwriter (Gian Franco Reverberi, Gianni Marchetti, Pino Pavone), and with the support of the Ciampi family itself, his daughter Mira.

It was a feat to bring order to the chaos of an artist who willingly lost track of himself, sent everyone to hell and concerts to hell. There is no need to go over his biography, which has already been much discussed. In here there is its existence, which is something else. Ciampi never runs away from existence, he is there punctually. The songs are the only place it stays. Songs that, before being cleaned up and made official, are hiccups, attempts, travails, games, second thoughts. They are perhaps not the best approach for those who don’t know his songs at all or for those who want to listen to him without interruptions and with a clear sound, but they will make fans happy. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it can be interesting to start like this, get lost immediately, and then discover how Ciampi manages to be credible and surprising even when his pieces take their final, packaged shape.

To provide us with a compass, the material was divided into three periods, as is done with painters. And perhaps it is not a coincidence, because painters and poets were more similar to him than his colleagues. The first is the period of Elvio Monti, arranger and composer who in 1967 found himself recording with Ciampi songs that are heard here for the first time: “Il tuo corpo” (on an orchestral basis and with some affinity with “Va” of 1975 ), “Why”, set in 1944, “One day or another I will kill you”, which has something of “One day or another I will leave you” but moves slower, and has a title that today would cause scandal (after all, it would happen to the most beautiful murder ballads by Nick Cave or to “Milano e Vincenzo” by Alberto Fortis). Unknown is “Va, la vita va”, melancholic, which reads: “Va, la vita va, flees quickly among the planets of the past”, and completely unpublished are “L’amore va”, “And now where will you go?” , guitar and voice, here still persuasive and melodic. We are in the midst of the 1960s atmosphere, Ciampi had already frequented the Parisian literary circles, achieved great failures, and composed for others.

This is followed by variations of published songs, including “Triste Sad”, i.e. the original of the well-known “Livorno” but with precious additional verses, such as “And I look for the infinite/in the time that has passed/because I didn’t understand/that the dreams are sin”, and a “Conphiteor” with different music and ending compared to the versions with Gianfranco Intra and Gian Franco Reverberi. It is his ruthless self-portrait: the good son who kicks dogs, holds insects from hell and strange dreams in his fist, gives in to a thousand temptations, driven by the desire to have everything, to do great things, finding himself with nothing in the evening. “Empty hands, a lonely heart,” he writes elsewhere.

Gianni Marchetti’s period goes from 1970 to 1977. The musician and friend, also a weaver of cinematographic arrangements, gave these recordings to the curator De Angelis upon Ciampi’s death, which occurred at the age of 45. Today he would be 90. They represent a completely different era. His voice changes progressively, it is less firm, more tormented, declamatory, sarcastic, finally dragging. Through the intercession of Gino Paoli, he managed to secure a contract from RCA. He collected two and a half million lire and disappeared faster than the wind. He drank the money, bet it on the green table, but seemed to despise it more than crave it. He said that the player is the only one who really understood the deadly nature of money, he is a warrior who tries to beat it every time. From other books, the figure of a slaughtered and generous man emerges. A few pennies in his pocket and he would pay for dinner for everyone, or a hotel for a poor man, or a rest for a prostitute, without asking for anything in return. But he was also “a great egoist, like every genius”, Paoli’s words, because he was devoted only to sacred, absolutist art. But then he apologized for the mistakes: “Forgive me, I’m a poet.”

He did his job for a living, and every now and then he went back to recording. Maybe these sessions didn’t produce official records, but stubs of other songs, repechages, revisitations. For example, on the CD there are multiple versions of “Miserere”, one with the false start: «Sorry, I don’t like it, I was out of concentration», and multiple wild versions of “Non c’è più l’America”: One in which he quotes differently Alberto Moravia brings up Norman Mailer, Christopher Columbus, and pronounces the final “s” of Albert Camus. The other in which he says «Jack Kerouac was killed when I was 42», instead of 47. Before starting, guitar and voice, he stops everything: «No Maestro, give me a cigarette, though, first». With him you never know if it’s part of the song or not. He plays everything without distinction between music and life. “But how?” “Come on?” “So what?”, the questions, the jokes, the puns, the quarrelsome tone, the admissions of suffering, the pauses: nothing is an extra, nothing is perceived as an artist’s pose. He summed himself up like this live on Radio Luna in 1977: «But how can I be happy if everyone else is unhappy?».

The version of “Never Move” is a hoot, of which until now only part of the lyrics were known: the music sounds like it comes from a 70’s police film. Ciampi makes mistakes, starts again, curses, laughs, supports himself on a constant cry in the background, yes throws in some kind of nonsensical scat, in fake Arabic, on a long funky tail. “In 30 years” is also heard for the first time with the music and the incipit: Night/ how much I don’t care/ not to say/ that I have to leave”. “You and I, Maria” does not have a happy ending here, while “Work” has more conversation.

Then there is the “songs for Nada” section, truly particular, because Ciampi sings many songs as a female that will end up in her 1973 album “Ho discovered that exist too”. Some are orchestrated, some sparse, voice and piano. The voice is Piero’s, but the protagonist is a woman, almost a retaliation for someone who has struggled to understand the opposite sex. These tracks were meant to orient Nada, to introduce her to the new repertoire, and contain pearls that were later removed, such as two sentences in “Confiteor”: “But they don’t know/ that I close my envy among many sunsets… But they don’t know/ that when it is afternoon/ I fear another evening”. The unreleased “Sono Seconda” and “Zambaro#2” also appear (the musical base, however, is that of “Adius”), excluded from Nada’s album..

The record is an important document but above all it is the invitation to collect a legacy, because once a poet has died, another has not been created. We notice exceptional passages at the last foam of the trail, and we no longer notice or give space to the beauty of the irregularities. This is why we are in dire straits.

Piero Ciampi, We’re in dire straits, 72 pp., with photographs by Uliano Lucas and digital collages by Daisy Jacuzzi, 2 CDs, edited by Enrico DeAngelis, Squilibri editore, €28

CD 1 The songs
1 Your Body #1 (1.33)
2 Why (2.26)
3 It goes, life goes (2.37)
4 Someday I will kill you (2.41)
5 Sad sad (Livorno #0) (2.57)
6 America Is No Longer #0 (1.58)
7 Miserere #0 (2.05)
8 Conphiteor #1 (2.22)
9 Never move (4.38)
10 In 30 years (5.43)
11 You and I, Maria #0 (3.25)
12 Job #0 (6.43)
13 Confiteor #0 (3.41)
14 On the port of Livorno #0 (3.42)
15 I’m second (3.57)
16 How Cold It Was #0 (3.38)
17 It Was Really You #0 (3.31)
18 Zambaro #2 (4.00)
Total duration 62.29

CD 2 The unfinished ones

1 Love Goes (2.57)
2 And where will you go now? (3.04)
3 Your Body #0 (2.38)
4 Spring Face #0 (2.42)
5 If… but… no… #0 (5.21)
6 If… but… no… #1 (5.00)
7 Miserere #2 (3.54)
8 This is miserable #4 (2.23)
9 America Is No Longer #2 (1.49)
10 America Is No Longer #3 (3.13)
11 Madonna of 2000 #1 (5.13)
12 Hitler in Jail #1 (2.28)
13 They Stopped Winter Too #1 (3.30)
14 The Story of Mr. YX #1 (3.49)

Total duration 48.40