Customer Reviews

Collection

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Conte's style is an amalgam of musical genres from the twenties and thirties--tango and early jazz--together with rhumba, chanson, samba and other influences. Oddly, he succeeds in digesting all of this into what is always a "Conte song." His songs are best if you understand the melancholy and nostalgia of the words, but even without them the music carries the snort of pride and condescension, the laughter, solitude, and understatement they would convey. This is NOT a collection of greatest hits or his most accessible songs--though it includes many of them: the battered idealistic love of "Con Te Sempre Piu Solo" and "La Ricostruzione del Mocambo" and "Luna di Marmellata" (Marmelade Moon), the delightful "Wanda," the surreally comic "La Giarrettiera Rosa" (the pink garter belt), and the searching "Genova per Noi." While we wait for the rest of Conte's stuff (which puts to shame America's false, bombastic, ideological, puerile poetic prophets like Dylan et al, ad nauseam) to be released in the U.S., this will help.

Although I am not a regular listener of foreign music, I enjoyed Paolo Conte's Greatest Hits very much. However, my second attempt at this type of music has left me disappointed. The Collection contains songs with rather unusual tempos and rhythms which, I believe, require an acquired taste to enjoy. If you are not a regular listener of Paolo Conte, I would suggest trying his more popular works before purchasing this one.