Nino Buoncore: Una Città Tra Le Mani (1988)

If y’all can count on one thing about me, it’s on this: I’m unafraid to promote adult music. Years of listening has led me to tuck away a special place for artists or music that gets by not on sonic gimmicks or complexity but on a certain amount of grace and sophistication. It’s what makes artists like Nino Buonocore, and albums like Una Città tra le Mani, make the cut. When you need a palette cleanser, something to make a meal out of your day (especially those rainy days), soft emotions – played with deep feeling – I have to think, have to hit, universally.

I go back to memories of Chet Baker. It was in the mid-50s when the jazz world and music critics couldn’t quite know what to do with albums like Chet Baker Sings and later, Chet and Broken Wing. In eras full of swing, hard bop, and fusion what the hell was the point of holding back? If you’ve ever heard “My Funny Valentine”, “I Fall In Love Too Easily”, and other totemic songs of “cool jazz” you’ll know the reason. There’s room to create music that’s comfortable, unfussy, and (most importantly) meaningful. 

It was in this whole other world, one that would be influenced by Chet’s work – for me, I think of the music of João Gilberto, Everything But The Girl, Björk, and Joni Mitchell, to name a precious few – to simply have your music touch on some of that rarefied territory, meant something. So, if you can, put yourself in the shoes of someone. Put yourself in the shoes of one Nino Buonocore.

In some studio in Naples, his birthplace and home, sometime in 1988, Nino was ready to reimagine and rethink his career. For the span of three or four albums, Nino had cast his creative net wide and long, and caught many songs touching on bleeding edge musical styles of the day. From New Wave to electro-funk, from Eurodisco to reggae and latin pop, seemingly, Nino left no modern musical stone untouched. If one could compare his trajectory it would be to that of one Elvis Costello. However, there was somethin nagging him, in this same studio, there was the presence of one Chet Baker. There was a seachange in his future.

How do you put the imprint of yourself in your music? That’s the question Nino kept asking himself after his last release, 1984’s Nino Buonocore. It would take him the span of nearly 8 years to come to his answer. 

Nino heard it in the ideas of Donald Fagen. He felt in his new scratch tracks. It’s that understated freedom of pairing things back. Nino wanted to speak a universal musical language and he felt jazz spoke that to him. He’d always been a solo artist but the importance of having a band to play off of, to play with, to hone in on his ideas, was more palpable than ever. To a crowd at the notorious Sanremo Festival, who in 1983 fell in love with the more dated-sounding “Nuovo Amore”, he’d play what would be his giant step in a new direction, “Rosanna” a torching ballad dedicated to his wife. 

Much like Paddy McAloon’s Prefab Sprout, Nino was updating this new generation of pop fans with music pockmarked with influences gleaned from soul, jazz, and the more atmospheric side of music. The flip side of what would be that lead-off single, “Quando Un Amore”, cemented this tonal shift. So when it came to fleshing out his ideas on a full album, Nino understood he’d need help.

In the beginning, Nino was able to conjure up the presence of noted Neopolitan musicians like James Senese, Mauro Pagini, Rino Zurzolo, and Rosario Jermano. An amazing crew to start this leftfield journey into the more “sophisticated” side of pop music. Little did he know that there was one final piece of the puzzle missing.

If one knows anything about Chet Baker’s life is that his world seemed to revolve around America and Italy. It was in Italy that when shit got too thick in America, he’d settle into and run off to, so much so that Italian became his second language. However, years of drug use and all sorts of worldly trouble, had placed Chet right back in Italy sometime in 1988, right before what would be his untimely death later on that year in Amsterdam.

It was on some fateful day at the urging of his management Nino approached Chet at some bar in Naples. For some time they had been aware of just how much Nino wanted to hear Chet in his music. So, semi-aware entirely of Chet’s mercurial being, they tried to prepare him. Nino would spend the night before fretting, unable to sleep, lost in the paranoia of not being able to know if he could convince Chet to play on his album. Nino thought the only way to convince him of his seriousness was to come prepared, with many of his ideas written out as sheet music to present him. What happened next would be far different than Nino imagined.

In some forgotten bar, Chet enjoyed Nino’s company and asked him about his music. Nino took out his stack of transcriptions, unaware of Chet’s disdain for sight-reading. What happened next was: Chet set them aside and simply asked Nino to sing a few bars of the songs for him. That would do it. Chet agreed to play with Nino on the condition that their work together would be collaborative and less, “you sing and I play this”.

When I listen to Una Città Tra Le Mani I’m caught by their universal language to music that helps bind the gorgeous tone of Chet Baker’s trumpet with Nino’s elegant windswept music. This was urbane music, not of America or some unknown land, it felt of his self and their Naples, “a city in their hands”, rightfully so.

Willy David and Bob Fix who had produced some of the Neopolitan scenes greats like Pino Daniele and Tony Esposito, brought some of the next-gen Italian soul shine they’d grace from little-known work of the likes of Enzo Avitabile, here. Gorgeous Balearic canzone like “Anche Questo è Amore” had an unreal sonic sheen to seem almost tailor-made to soundtrack all sorts of heady discoteques. 

What can one make of the spectacular interplay between Nino and assembled crew in “Tieni Il Tempo”? What begins as a wonderfully tasteful electro-jazz funk grows into this quasi-ambient dance groove where Chet’s able to sail through, grounding Nino’s soul music into some timeless air. There’s just this moving grace that I love to come back and experience when I put on Una Città Tra Le Mani and hope you too.

I hear the grace of maturity in a song like “Boulevard”. In gentle movements, punctuated by finger snaps, a barely-there musical sway guides our ears to some kind of plaintive paradise, and here and there, you hear all involved stand back giving space to space, letting Nino’s beautiful ideas unfurl and in this case, James Senese on sax and Chet Baker on trumpet punctuate a well-placed line of thinking. The Tom Petty-indebted “Le Tue Chiavi Non Ho” even adds a welcome wrinkle bringing in Mauro Pagini to show Nino’s other influence, the roots music of Italy.

It would be on songs like “Un Pò Di Più” and “Rosanna” where Nino and Chet’s more personal collaborative work would come to be. On the former, that new nocturnal music, inspired by the work of groups like Blue Nile, showed its face. Here an atmospheric ambient ballad sways between the sophisticated arrangement explored by Chet and Nino’s impressionistic modal jazz, a push and a pull, resolving itself in some impressive inbetween music like little else in Nino’s homeland and elsewhere.

When the rays of light begin to shine through the meditative clouds of this recording, as we’ll hear in a song, like the reimagined “Rosanna”, we’re able to impress just how right was Nino to pursue Chet. Chet’s ideas still held something new for now. For all the sturm und drang of youth, there is still something to be said of all the water and life saturated deep in the wells pooling out of those with lived-through experience. Chet was once before at Nino’s fork in the road. At least, that’s what keeps me coming back lately to this source.

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