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A musician like Mauro Pagani he really has more lives than a cat, a very talented, quick-change cat, and in Nine lives and ten blues, an autobiography to be released on 21 September for Bompiani, tries to tell them all, even if one thing is certain: there are not enough pages to contain all the music and life it has generated. Multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer, first co-founder of the Premiata forneria Marconi and then collaborator of the greatest: Demetrio Stratos, Gianna Nannini, Ornella Vanoni, Roberto Vecchioni, Massimo Ranieri, Francesco Guccini (with him the recent Travel Notes), Vasco, Luciano Ligabue and many others. Sue the soundtracks of masterpieces such as Nirvana by Gabriele Salvatores, the artistic direction of Sanremo and his also the unmistakable imprint he left in 14-year partnership with Fabrizio De Andréa period to which milestones such as Creuza de mä And Clouds.
The starting point of the autobiography arises from an accident that calls everything into question. In January 2020, before Covid came to mess up everyone’s life, a neurological problem causes him a ‘general amnesia: “Names, faces, episodes: all disconnected, without order, without identity and above all without meaning“The effort of recovering the order of things becomes not only the pretext for retracing a very rich life and career but also the opportunity to look back with renewed awareness: “Having the opportunity to revisit one’s past, especially from a new, different point of view, I think is a great gift of fate.“. The tape rewinds and restarts from that “a quarter to midnight on February 5, 1946 in Chiari”, A small town between Bergamo and Brescia, one lonely post-war childhood (the date of his conception, he calculates, was April 25, 1945) with the companion of adventure books but above all of music, first learned on the radio and then from his father Ugo, who worked at Mechanical workshops (and this is the name of the recording studio and music laboratory that Pagani founded in 1998) and he was also the first flute of the town band.
After the ambiguous prophecy of a parish priest (“Of one thing I am sure: he will either become a great saint or a great criminal!“), here are the years of youth, as lonely as rebellious, always with the attempt of music to straighten things out: the violin lessons, the discovery of rock’n’roll, the improvised stay in Sanremo, the arrival from the United States of new genres and artists (Pink Floyd, Doors, Jimi Hendrix , Traffic, Janis Joplin but also Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Otis Redding…). A lot of study, a lot of curiosity and also i first and changing musical groups: The Heralds, the Daltons, the Ones, who became the Krel and finally – a kind of product placement ante litteram – Premiata Forneria Marconi, from the name of the bakery in whose basement they rehearsed: It was the revolution: no one had brought prog music to Italy in this way, no one had so much also happened abroad, from Japan to the United States: “After months away from home we lacked everything. The bar, the cappuccino, the newspapers and the Campari. The affections, the friends, the family“.
Rereading the history of Pagani and his successes with Pfm is also taking a trip into history of Italy in those yearsfrom the Sixty-eight (passed almost over their heads: “the great value and at the same time the great limit of the Italian province of those years was to dilute everything under the reassuring umbrella of the repetitiveness of gestures, words and events”) to the inequalities between north and south, between cities and towns, but also the bigot traditionalism of many social and even artistic circles, even the broadest international socio-political context, between the war in Vietnam and the counterculture. They were also years, however, of one unparalleled cultural climatefrom which the musician drew heavily both on the musical front (King Crimson, Genesis, Yes, Incredible String Band, Bob Dylan …) and on the literary one (Ferlinghetti – whose father was also from Chiari, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and the whole Beat Generation).
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