Conte will not be underestimated his pleasant Italian canto is a jungle of tigers and hidden traps. “Sparring Partner” pretends to be a pop song while putting over a bludgeoning sense of sorrow he writes songs for “Hemingway” and “Bartali” (a 1950s cyclist) but uses them to reveal his own self.
“Boogie,” from his great album of the same name, is a six-minute tour de force that looks into the dark soul of a hard-jiving existence, and “Gong-Oh” is a spavined Charleston full of nostalgia”sensual, invisible, theoretical.” Conte also takes on playful guises, like a magician practicing the most suave of misdirections. Most of his songs hint at the underworld tug of Raymond Chandler’s darkest premonitions with the same ease they take on world music motifssinuous Eastern guitars, Marseilles accordions, shimmying Latin rhythms. Conte refers to jazz often enough that the genre takes on the form of an artifacta rowdy, lost matrix against which his sophisticated juke-joint bopping measures itself, and elegantly slinks away.
Precision arrangements, a wide-swath boogie swing, and elliptical lyricism grounded by a hard piano are Conte’s hallmarks, although the result is not quite jazz, nothing like big band, and the furthest thing from poetic singer-songwriting.
Paolo Conte is an Italian bandleader who writes Leonard Cohen-ish songs and brings them to joyous life with the help of a big, complex band and his own grainy, world-weary vocals. Paolo Conte (born January 6, 1937) is an Italian singer, pianist, composer, and lawyer notable for his grainy, resonant voice, his colourful and dreamy compositions (evocative of Italian and Mediterranean sounds, as well as of jazz music, South American atmospheres, and of French-language singers like Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens) and his.