Vinicio Capossela

If you're looking for a sound that navigates between the theatrical and the narrative, with one foot in the grittiest blues and the other in salon jazz, Vinicio Capossela is your man. His songs don’t sound like records: they sound like scenes, like characters stepping in and out of an improvised stage, where the piano can become a roadside bar and the guitar a tavern recital. There’s something of Fred Buscaglione in the way he tells stories with irony and melancholy, but also that Tom Waits air that gives his melodies the weight of early morning, when the city is no longer the same. He’s not a singer-songwriter who stays in the intimate realm; his songs demand to be seen, not just heard, as if each stanza carried a costume and a gesture behind it.

In 1990, with All'una e trentacinque circa, he released his first album and won a Targa Tenco for best debut. But it was in 1996 when the game got serious: Il ballo di San Vito isn’t an album, he himself said, but a story. Songs like Accolita dei rancorosi —taken from a book by John Fante— or L'affondamento del Cinastic —about a literary café that sank in Milan— blend literature and music with a naturalness few dare to attempt. That album took him to Paris in 1995, where he sold out the Theatre de la Ville, and from then on, his name was no longer a secret among those seeking something more than catchy chords.