“It takes an ear”, variety show with Elio at the Teatro Verdi in Florence
Saturday 14 January 2023at 20.45, at Verdi Theater in Florence the variety show will be staged “It takes an ear” with Elio. Enzo Jannacci, the poet as he liked to call himself, was the most eccentric and personal songwriter in the history of Italian song, able to weave together seemingly irreconcilable themes: joy and sadness, tragedy and farce, joy and melancholy. And every time his gaze, poetic and bizarre, has managed to displace, to amaze: popular and nonconformist at the same time.
Jannacci is also the artist who better than anyone else has been able to tell the Milan of the suburbs of the 60s and 70s, transfiguring it into a sort of very real and touching theater of the absurd, where to enclose myriads of picaresque and borderline characters, borderline of the surreal.
“Minimum stuff”, said Jannacci: bums, drug addicts, prostitutes with silk socks, but also dogs with hair or telegraph operators with an urgent heart.
A Buster Keaton of the song, born from the parts of Lambrate, which will be revisited, reinterpreted and “re-sung” by Elio.
On stage, in the colorful scenography designed by Giorgio Gallione, we will find together with Elio five musicians, his extravagant traveling companions, who will form an unusual and bizarre sound caravan: Alberto Tafuri on piano, Martino Malacrida on drums, Pietro Martinelli on bass and double bass, Sophia Tomelleri on saxophone, Giulio Tullio on trombone. They will have the task of accompanying the crackling confrontation between two acrobats of music grappling with a boundless and unrepeatable human and musical repertoire, enriched by writings and thoughts of real or ideal traveling companions, of “sketch” Jannacci. From Umberto Eco to Dario Fo, from Francesco Piccolo to Marco Presta, to Michele Serra.
A playful and profound show because “those who don’t laugh are not serious people”.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT by Giorgio Gallione
“Acrobat don’t look, acrobat don’t touch, don’t try to understand, that a smile from the third row never comes. And the theater is not attempted, and life is not invented, you become acrobats yes… but then… acrobats you die. Hopla!” (Enzo Jannacci)
A part circus part song theater show, where a band of five musicians, thanks to the arrangements by Paolo Silvestri, will allow Elio, absurdist philosopher and eccentric performer, to surf the repertoire of his beloved Jannacci, tutelary deity and putative father of that part of the historic songwriting which has never been ashamed of the joys of language and thought or of the libertarian sneer, and which considers the Comedian, even in music, not as a blindly carefree ingredient but rather a powerful instrument of the spirit of denial, of divergent thinking which destroys the old and prepares for the new. Subversion of common sense, world upside down, playful aggression against boredom and standardized languages and which, at the same time, is not afraid to create discomfort or generate doubts.
Thus, in the infinite panorama of the figures that inhabit the Jannacci universe there are also painful characters, sad and inadequate clowns who often stumble in life. Our show will therefore be a journey into this highly theatrical pantheon, where to live “you need an ear” and where, as acrobats, you live and die… Opla!
HELIUM NOTE
“It takes an ear” is not a tribute, but a reconstruction of his world of nonsense, comic and poignant (…)
It’s a journey into Jannacci’s eras, because it hasn’t always been the same: among the songs there’s The moon is a light bulb, Armando, El purtava i tennis shoes, songs that I laugh as I sing them. I’ll do some snubs, Talking to lemons, When the curtain comes down. Because there’s comedian Jannacci and the one that breaks your heart from Vincenzina or Giovanni telegrapher, laughter and drama. How is life: imperfect. And no one knows it better than those who live in our country (…)
Once we met in the Rai studios. He mumbled something, so did I, he didn’t understand, neither did I. I’m a shy. I would never have had the courage to tell him “I’m your fan”. This is the only contact I’ve had with Enzo Jannacci. (…) But there is a curiosity: my dad had been his classmate, he talked to me about it, he made me listen to it and it already made me laugh. As an adult, I was fascinated by the dignity of the comedian that he brought to the author’s song and the surreal style of his laughter, which was the atmosphere of the Derby, the cabaret in Milan, which I missed for personal reasons. In hindsight, I regret not having had ten more years: the 70s, torn apart by terrorism, were among the freest and most revolutionary on an artistic level. In those years there are all my gods, one of these is Enzo Jannacci.
(from the interview with Anna Bandettini, on Repubblica)
ELIO, biography
Born in one area of Milan, at an early age he moved to another area of Milan, but always in the suburbs. Then after so many years he goes to live outside Milan, but not so much, where he still lived, but in the suburbs in the area where he had gone at an early age as I mentioned earlier.
Milan, the city that gave birth to Elio, is also the city where he goes to school, elementary, middle school, Einstein scientific high school, with Mangoni, engineering university (polytechnic) finished slowly, civic school of music where he plays the transverse flute and he also graduated from the G. Verdi conservatory in Milan, which however G. Verdi was born in Busseto but there’s not even a joking comparison to make. In addition, he plays football in Milanese, in Fatima, in Corsico until the age of 18, then plays baseball in Ares, a sport that he still likes. Military obligations fulfilled from 1986 to 1988, since 1979 he has been trying to make the dream of Elio e le Storie Tese come true.
For more information:
https://www.teatroverdifirenze.it/genere/ci-vuole-orecchio/