Square Dancing: Paolo Conte and "Quadrille"

The random tune for today, Quadrille, is by Paolo Conte. Conte was born in Asti in the Piedmont region of Italy, and he began his music career as a vibraphone player traveling in local and touring bands. He started writing songs early on in his career with his brother Giorgio but eventually began writing on his own. His star rose in the 60s and 70s as he was the main creative songwriter behind hits of other well-known Italian artists. His solo career commenced in 1974. His songs are known for being evocative of colorful and dreamy Italian and Mediterranean sounds. His music is often jazzy, reminiscent of South America and French singers, and filled with a wistful melancholy. His music has also been used in many movies. Quadrille can be found on his 1998 compilation album The Best of Paolo Conte.

On the Main Line: Paolo Conte and "Chiamami Adesso"

I don't mean to rain on the St. Patrick's Day parade with an Italian artist, but if I am to keep to randomness, well, sometimes it will indulge me and other times not. Today, it gave me an Italian tune.

Paolo Conte, who we've highlighted before, was born in Asti in the Piedmont region of Italy, and he began his music career as a vibraphone player traveling in local and touring bands. He started writing songs early on in his career with his brother Giorgio but eventually began writing on his own. His star rose in the 60s and 70s as he was the main creative songwriter behind hits of other well-known Italian artists. His solo career commenced in 1974. His songs are known for being evocative of colorful and dreamy Italian and Mediterranean sounds. His music is often jazzy, reminiscent of South America and French singers, and filled with a wistful melancholy. His music has also been used in many movies. This song, Chiamami Adesso, can be found on his 2003 album Reveries.The song is an appeal for an ex-lover to telephone.

Pushed to the End of the World: Maighread ni Dhomhnaill and "Amhran Pheadar Breathnach"

One of the reasons I love Celtic music is the ever-present melancholy that undergirds every song. It could be the most raucous song about dancing or drinking, or the most mournful air ever piped, and that same melancholy drives the song. Perhaps it's the instrumentation, or perhaps it is something more. I remember, when I was hitchhiking down the west coast of Ireland, feeling the weight of the history and geography of the island - the rocky fields that looked like a struggle to farm, the lonely towns appearing like they were just barely clinging to the earth, the stoicism of a people whose faces and postures and their general composures bore silent witness to the hardships they faced throughout their history. I remember reading a passage once about the music of the Irish, of the Celts in general, that remarked upon this mournfulness of a people who had wandered far and ended up on the last rock to the west - they could go no farther - and that their music bewailed their fate and their loneliness and solitude.

I take to melancholy quite a bit, and I find melancholy music strangely comforting. To me, the music of the Irish and Celts is a music that transcends centuries. It speaks of heights reached and lost, and lows fallen into and recovered from. It speaks of death and famine and war and oppression even at the same time as it speaks to joy and celebration and peace and plenty. It is hard, in this modern day, to find such complexity of emotion in music and therefore I value Irish and Celtic music for what it is - a representation of a human condition.

Even though it is gussied up a bit in modern instrumentation and , you can hear this complex melancholy in Maighread ni Dhomhnaill's rendition of Amhran Pheadar Breathnach. Each stanza of the lyric starts on an upnote, but quickly falls down into a minor downnote, and in fact the whole song is really in a minor key. The lyrics are also complex, telling the story of a mysterious man who appears on an island apparently running from something. A young woman accosts him, not trusting him, but wanting to know his story. They develop a relationship cemented over drinking together in a pub though there appears to be some danger for both of them to be together. The woman encourages him to sing for his drinks, and soon some other young men show up and begin singing with them, and the song ends on that up note. Here are the lyrics translated at celticlyricscorner.net:

Since I've been traveling

I have watched the sky

Chased 'round about the island

Like a doe chased by a hound

And everyone around the harbor said

When I arrived at the quay

"I can tell from your gloom

That you're a man being chased"

I met a nice young girl

But right away she spoke sharply

"If you're the man who molested young women

I don't think much of your kind

I saw a man on the mainland

Wandering around barefoot yesterday

And I think that you're the young fellow

Who has someone chasing him"

I answered the nice young girl

So she understood my story well

"Don't tease me anymore

As I'm not that kind of man

But come over here in front of me

And stop chattering that nonsense

Or I'll disappear in front of your face

And go back to the mainland right now"

When we got tired and depressed

I inquired of the quiet young woman

"Where can we get something to drink

That will take this sadness from us?"

"There's a little house on the side of the road

And there's always a drop kept there

Go and rap on the board

And you won't have to spend a penny"

When we went into the shebeen

We nervously sat down

For fear that we'd be found out

And the young woman taken from me

When we found what we wanted

I said we should take a walk

But she said, "Sing some songs

And it won't cost you a penny"

Oh I wasn't singing for very long

When the young men came to the shebeen

Every one of them with a jug in his hand

To accompany the two of us

There was plenty of drink to go around

Since not many folks in the countryside drink

But if I could drink a gallon of O'Donnell's

It would be easy to pay for my twenty drinks

There, in one song, is the complexity of Irish life...love, drink, mystery, hardship, survival, poverty...a mix of melancholy and hopefulness. And Celtic music does this over and over again. That is why I love Celtic music.

Now about the artist, who is a big part of why this song is so haunting. Maighread ni Dhomhnaill was brought up in as a native Irish speaker in Kells, County Meath and her family was a well known musical family and collectors of Irish music. She was part of the highly regarded group Skara Brae, which recorded only one album that is considered a classic of Irish music because it first brought pop and guitars to traditional Irish tunes, and the first to include vocal harmonization in Irish traditional songs. She gave up music for a while, studying nursing and raising a family, but has since come back to music, performing with the West Ocean String Quartet and joining her sister Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, Moya Brennan and Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh as part of the Celtic supergroup T with the Maggies. Amhran Pheadar Breathnach is from her 1991 album Gan Dhá Phingin Spré (No Dowry) and can also be found on the CD Putumayo Presents Women of the World: Celtic.

Dancing Fool: Liana and "Estrela da Tarde"

Way back in 1995, my bride was embarrassed. It was our wedding night in Milwaukee, it was our wedding dance, and we didn't know how to dance. We faked it. Shuffle shuffle shuffle, kind of like two junior high school kids draped on one another like leaning trees. Megan declared at that time that we would learn to how to dance.

Fast forward a few months. We have moved to Texas, and Megan came home from work and told me that she'd enrolled us in ballroom dancing lessons. No discussion. We went to the classes, where a nice couple told us that they would teach us foxtrot, box step, waltz, two-step, swing, and even a little tango. I learned that I didn't have two left feet, could do the steps, and even look reasonably good doing them. Megan had to learn not to lead me, but to let me lead.

The hardest one was the tango. We only had time to learn a few moves, and I've since forgotten them. Those I didn't feel like I was very good at doing. I've spoken to my co-worker Adam, who has taken tango lessons and attended tango dances on a weekly basis. He assured me that it takes a LONG time to learn tango, and that at the dances, it is difficult to get practice because the good tango dancers don't want to dance with the beginners, and therefore the beginners are stuck trying to teach each other, like the blind leading the blind. I can still tear up the floor on a swing dance, though I'd like to learn some more moves, and I enjoy waltzing also. In fact, I try to tell all of my younger, single guy friends that if they want to have more dates than they know what to do with, they should learn how to dance, but they don't believe me. That's fine...I don't mind being the rooster in the henhouse that all the hens admire!

Today's song, Estrela da Tarde (Evening Star) is an interesting hybrid between a fado and a tango. You may remember the fado from past posts as being a melancholy song about longing for the sea or about those who are poor. Fado has a particular structure and therefore resembles tango in that way, which also has a particular structure. Both tango and fado can be associated with the underclass, in the case of the longing of fado for the simplicity of the poor life and in tango, the rise of the music and dance from the poorest sections of society, into organized crime, and finally into its association with sexual sophistication.

The person who sings Estrela da Tarde goes by the name of Liana, a young and rising singer in Portugal who started singing fado professionally at age 9 and has won 11 first prizes in fado competitions. In 2004 she released her first professional album, Fado.pt and followed it up in 2005 with her second, Sombra, in 2005. In 2007, she teamed up with Reem Kelani in a concert titled From Palestine to Portugal where she sang in Portuguese and Arabic. Not only a singer, she is also an award winning stage actress. She sponsors a child in Mozambique, is an animal rights activist and vegetarian and volunteers with the elderly in Lisbon. She currently has released five albums. Estrela da Tarde blends the very similar elements of fado and tango with electronica into a song of longing:

My love, my love

my evening star

The moon is rising and my body is waiting for you

My love

I am not certain

if you are my joy or my sorrow

Estrela da Tarde can be found on Liana's 2004 release Fado.pt, and is included on Putumayo Presents: Tango Around the World (2007). This video is from her appearance on a Portuguese television show.

Italian Serenade: Paolo Conte and "Come Di"

It was not long after I had visited Italy, and spent some time with a German friend, Ellen, who was employed as an au pair in Rome. Sometime after I got home, I received a mix tape from her (yes, a cassette tape, I'm that old). She had put on the mix a bunch of Italian music - this was in the early 90s, I would guess. Two of the songs that I really liked were by a guy named Paolo Conte. Of course, the internet was not that well established yet, and there was not a lot of opportunity for me to find information on Paolo Conte. I had my two songs that I played a lot, and that was it.

Over time and moves to different cities I lost the cassette tape. While living in San Antonio, sometime in the late 90s, Megan and I went to see a band called 8½ Souvenirs that we heard was really good. They were playing in a little place near the San Antonio River. A a few songs caught my ear - one called Happy Feet, one called No Lo Visto and one called Come Di. Two of those songs, I later learned, were covers of Paolo Conte songs, and the other was very much in the spirit of Paolo Conte. But at the time I didn't put two and two together. It wasn't until I began to delve into music from around the world I reacquainted myself with Paolo Conte, and made the connection. Because of those 8½ Souvenirs songs, and I really liked the Paolo Conte ones, I was introduced to a new area of music.

So, who is this guy? Paolo Conte is an Italian singer, pianist, composer and lawyer. Born in Asti, in the Piedmont region of Italy, he began his music career as a vibraphone player traveling in local and touring bands. He started writing songs early on in his career with his brother Giorgio but eventually began writing all on his own. His star rose in the 60s and 70s as he was the main creative songwriter behind hits of other well-known artists Italian artists. His solo career commenced in 1974.

His songs are known for being evocative of colorful and dreamy Italian and Mediterranean sounds. His music is often jazzy, reminiscent of South America and French singers, and filled with a wistful melancholy. His music has been used in many movies, and today's song, Come Di, was used in the 2003 film I Am David. Come Di is from the 1986 album of the same same, and this version was videotaped live.

A Sense of Longing: Deolinda and "Uma Ilha"

Sometimes there is nothing better than to immerse oneself in melancholy.  The great Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, in his book Istanbul, has long descriptions of cultural melancholy as people in the modern Turkish state who are old enough to remember the splendor of the Ottoman Empire look back on glories of the past amid the uncertainties of the present and future.  Individual melancholy hits us from time to time as well, usually as we personally revisit the past and compare it with our own presents and and uncertainties, or even perhaps when we get the "grass is always greener" syndrome and think of what might have been or what could have been had we only did this or that previously.  I am as susceptible to this as any other.  I like wallowing in melancholy once in a while.  I even put together a melancholy song list that I can access to feed that particular feeling.

The Portuguese word that best describes this feeling is saudade, which is not directly translatable but connotes longing.  In Portuguese music, the fado has developed over centuries to capture this longing.  Fados are often slow, serious songs.  They are often about the sea or about the life of the poor, and are usually accompanied by Portuguese guitar.  They are an unique contribution to world culture, so much so that the UN has inscribed fado on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list to bring awareness to its significance and to protect it.  Famous Portuguese performers of fado include Amália Rodrigues, Carlos do Carmo, and Ana Moura among many others.

Deolinda is a band that formed in 2006 when the brothers Pedro da Silva Martins and Luis José Martins asked their cousin Ana Bacalhau to sing on a few songs they had written.  Realizing that her voice fit perfectly with their songs, they formed Deolinda and rounded out the band with her husband José Pedro Leitã.  Their first album, Canção Ao Lado (2008), reached number 3 on the Portuguese charts, and their followup album, Dois selos e um carimbo (2010), hit number 1.  During this period, the band performed a song called Parva que Sous at their concerts, which was a social criticism of Portugal and the lack of opportunities for young people.  Most of Europe was going through a financial crisis, and youth unemployment was enormous, especially in poorer EU countries.  The song became an anthem among economically hurt youth in Portugal and went viral on social media, with bootleg copies of concert performances shared in great numbers.  Deolinda released their third album, Mundo Pequenino, in 2013.

The band's style is inspired by fado, but they have made numerous departures from the form.  While fado utilizes Portuguese guitar, the band does not.  Deolinda's songs are often contain social criticism, and can be lively, upbeat, ironic and humorous which does not fit the usual melancholy style of fado either.  Fado performers often dress in black when performing, but Deolinda does not.  Perhaps they are defining a post-fado or neo-fado style?  However this song, Uma Ilha (An Island) from their 2010 release Dois Selos e um Carimbo, does fit the traditional fado style with references to the sea and hidden secrets from a lover, and a slow, almost mournful pace highlighting Ana Bacalhou's beautiful voice.