The multifaceted elegance of Joan Thiele

At 6pm on a Sundayat Santeria Toscana 31, time takes on a different form. Late afternoon, unusual time for a concertsuspends the habit and opens a listening space that resembles a screening more than a traditional live performance. Even before music, the context builds a story. On the evening of December 14, Joan Thiele’s tour in support of his latest album “Joanita”, released after his debut in Sanremo, arrives in Milan. And they even appear at the bar cocktails dedicated to his songs. Three drinks, entitled “Acqua blu”, “Forma liquida” and “Veleno”, translate the songs into blends of gin, bourbon and botanical aperitifs, including citrus fruits, herbs, bitters and Mediterranean notes, prolonging the musical story even in the gesture of waiting.

The audience calmly takes their seats, while the light slowly gives way to another dimension. When the darkness is crossed by smoke from the stage and from the speakers, the voice of Joan’s grandmother arrives singing in Neapolitan “Crazy girl”, the room stops being a venue and it becomes a place of visiona shared set in which every gesture prepares the entrance of the music.

The band attacks and “The liquid form” opens the concert as a frontier sequence, between western references and science fiction suggestions. Joan Thiele emerges from the darkness with a white veil on her heada figure that recalls ritual and cinematic imagery, then reveals himself and greets the public with a few words, revealing a double-breasted black suit and hair moved by the artificial wind of the scene. From this moment, the scenography takes shape through lights, smoke and air movementwhile the singer-songwriter’s body follows the music and changes its function. “Puta” becomes a moment of collective calling: “This is for all my girls,” Joan tells the audience: “Make yourself heard and be respected”.

“Cinema” And “Kiss on the forehead” mark the transition to guitar, with the latter song introduced as exercise in listening to instinct and transformed into one of the most intense sections of the setbetween distortions, drums and an idea of ​​rock as an emotional language. The group that accompanies Joan Thiele is made up of musicians with surgical precisioncapable of filling the space and, in completely white clothes, leaving the protagonist role to the voice.

The concert proceeds as a narrative in chapters. “Joanita” brings it all back in an abstract dimension, made of broken rhythms and synchronized movements, where RnB blends with soul and the instinct of jazz. While “Tramonto” and “Veleno” work on the theme of emotion as a matter to be explored, with the latter presented as a tool for anger management. On “Occhi da gangster”, Joan invites the evening’s guest, Frah Quintale, onto the stagecreating a meeting between vocals and rap. The two immediately find a striking understanding, as happened when the singer-songwriter moved to Ariston which had chosen the rapper for the evening of covers and duets.

The atmospheres repeatedly recall the legacy of Italian cinema and the name of Piero Umilianian explicit reference to an imagery that finds a complete form on the record and which translates live into sound and space. “Breathless” opens a different parenthesis, followed by a more intimate moment with “The invisible“, performed by Joan alone accompanied by a guitarist, before the band returned for “Woman’s face”, a song that Joan presents as part of a personal journey linked to time and growth.

With the Sanremo single “Echo“the audience, until then composed, enters the concert directly, raising their phones to film the moment, and letting themselves go in chorus on the chorus for a visible and tangible participation. A technical problem on “The holidays” interrupts the flow but not the story. While the microphone turns off, the voice continues, supported by the room, until the sound returns and the closing with “Hallucination“. The encore broadens the gaze, culminating with “Let life fly” by Víctor Jara, a choice that shifts the ending onto a level of memory and meaning. At 9.30pm, in the same space, another concert is planned, but the one at 6pm remains as an experience in itself, an autonomous time in which Joan Thiele confirms an artistic style based on storytelling, listening and relationshipsclose to a cinema show.

The lineup:

The liquid form
Goddess
Blue water
Puta
XX LA
Cinema
Kiss on the forehead
Joanita
Sunset
Poison
Gangster eyes
Breathless
The invisible
Woman’s face
Echo
Cruz

Encore:
The holidays
Hallucination
Let life fly (by Víctor Jara)