Le Canzoni della mala playlist

Songs of the mob

Nineteen fifty-eight was a watershed year, and not only for Italian music: the beginning of the economic miracle coincided with the worldwide success of Modugno’s Volare, the first appearance of Mina and Celentano (still today the most popular voices of all time), and the first steps of a new genre which would go by the name of singer-songwriter music. Among the debuts of that year, we should recall that of Ornella Vanoni: with her cocksure poses and a style reminiscent of the French existentialists (Juliette Grèco in particular), she recorded Le canzoni della malavita (‘Songs of the Mob’) at the urging of Giorgio Strehler and with the collaboration of Dario Fo and Fiorenzo Carpi – the avantgarde of Milan’s Piccolo Teatro. This was an intellectual endeavour, which aimed at portraying the Bohemian romanticism of the Milanese criminal underworld to produce a musical repertoire that actually never existed and thus had to be invented ex novo. Presented at the Spoleto Festival in 1959, the album met with critical success and inspired other artists working in Milan – such as the Gufi, Gaber and Jannacci – to add to the collective imagination about the ‘mob’ with other songs and parodies. This anthology recalls the hits of that period (Vanoni would produce an expanded remake of that album in 1982) together with other mob songs from Rome, performed by the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano and Lando Fiorini.