Review: Sweet World Music Escapism - Page 2

I enjoyed my first listen to Italian Café less, but I have listened to the album far more than North African Groove in the intervening weeks since they both arrived.

My first thought, as it began to play during dinner one night, was, “Yikes, this must be what the music would have sounded inside Dean Martin’s head if someone slipped him some heavy hallucinogens.”

The disconnect was mine, though, and not the album’s. I soon realized that while my perception of Italian café music was shaped by Italian-American crooners like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, this music was the real thing, not a surrealist imitation. Or perhaps more accurately, a real thing, or many real things, since the compilation features classic music from the 1950s and ’60s, breaking out after the repressive musical environment of World War II Italy, as well as contemporary Italian music that still bears fruit characteristic of these exuberant roots.

While the background vocals on many of the Italian Café songs will sound theme-park corny to jaded modern ears (the introduction to Quartetto Cetra’s Un Bacio a Mezzanotte is nicely representative example), the lead singers are without exception wonderful; slightly scratchy, smoky voices, gruff and low and full of cool passion (check out Giorgio Conte’s Gnè Gnè). Those voices wind in and out of prominent bass guitar lines like fat snakes.

So despite my initial puzzlement, Italian Café, packed with oddities and musical lagniappes, has turned out to be my favorite for just sitting and listening to. Add to the compilation a warm, summer evening with Kristen on the back porch, the heat from the afternoon sun still baking up from the boards and a breeze rolling up off the river, a cool bottle of Pinto Grigio, bejewled with condensation, and I think the escape will be almost complete. Not quite Italy, but a heck of a lot more manageable than a transatlantic flight, especially when I have to be back for work in the morning.

Both CDs have liner notes in multiple languages. Song samples are available to listen to at www.putumayo.com. Portions of profits from the CDs are donated to charities.

Article Author: Ernesto Burden

Ernesto Burden is a digital media executive in the newspaper publishing industry. He has been an editor and reporter with daily and weekly newspapers. He is a writer, runner, musician and an avid student of the Web, technology, literature, religion …

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