On October 6, Ivan Graziani, a songwriter who suggested a new approach to Italian rock, would have turned eighty years old. To celebrate them, but above all To pay homage to his songs, his son Filippo is thinking about it, face and rocker face with a Romagna accent, an accent that is enriched with tenderness when he pronounces the word “dad”. After the success of the first dates, Flippo returns with the summer tour “Eighty. Happy birthday Ivan”, turning all over Italyfrom Rimini to Salerno, from Venice to Trani. A musical journey between the best known and most intimate successes of Ivan Graziani, rearranged and renewed by Flippo, as if to create a generational bridge.
Filippo, speaking of generational bridge, how would you tell your dad’s music to today’s young people?
“I think dad is experiencing a beautiful moment of rediscovery, due to the fact that there was probably a shift, a movement in needs. Dad passed from texts that had to do with the hard reality, with the cynical reality, with the heaviest and most violent sides of life, to the more courtly ones of delicate loves. Two aspects of the same medal, which dad transferred to the characters scattered inside his discography. Cyclical and periodically they rediscover songs whose sensitivity is more in line at the historical moment that is lived.
Today there is a return to the Italian songwriting, for example, let’s think about Lucio Corsi. He said that he wanted to write your father’s songs, even if, so, he was able to appreciate them as a listener, indeed, let’s say from his great admirer.
“Yes, Lucio is a top -level grazianist, first category. We met for this reason. I like it very much and he is the proof that the moment is mature for a rediscovery of this type of music, the moment of a more personal approach and communication. This is perhaps the moment when you need more to find your own truth, your own personality within a song. “
Filippo, you were a teenager when your dad disappeared: what relationship did you have with his songs? Did you listen to them and appreciate already or have you rediscovered them later?
“Even if dad disappeared early, I was lucky, even naively we can say, to assiduously also attend his artistic side. Dad had the study on the other side of the garden, and I as a child and then as a boy, I always getaway in his production study. I had the honor of seeing born and growing with the entire albums, songs that then became important and famous. There are songs of the latest album of dad who are directly inspired by experiences that I sent him, sides of my life of which I made him participate, and which then became songs. “
Can I ask you for a title of your “transfigured” side in a song?
“In the first album published posthumous, there is a song called” Porto Canale “, dueted with Biagio Antonacci: it is a song that dad wrote after I led him to see the writers who drew graffiti at the port of Rimini. Dad’s writing is a nostalgic, teenage writing. Many of his songs are stories of adolescence, where the lessons are at the best of their power: moment.
Is there any songs to which you are most tied to?
“More than individual songs, there are records that I particularly love playing.” Seni and Coseni “, for example, released in 1981, is a record that I particularly love. It represents a dad who starts towards a boa lap, from what had been before what would have been artistically become in the songs. It is a record that I am very tied to. The songs inside I feel very.”
It is beautiful to feel the esteem, the love of a child towards the works of their father, to carry on those songs rearranged according to one’s own style (albeit similar to the original one), and made known to today’s generations. Also accompanied by your brother Tommy, musician too. Is this the legacy that your dad Ivan passed you?
“I think so: my mission is precisely this. I started from a stage, where the spectators were few and the average age was quite high, and now slowly on the Ann, I find myself in the concerts three generations of people: grandparents, fathers and teenage children.
I am from 1981 and mine is the generation that less than all has not lived dad. It was the period in which songwriters did not arouse great interest among young people. For this he is less familiar with him. Thus happens that people come to concerts without knowing Ivan Graziani’s songs, and then they become fond of it. Music is like good food. If you can make it savor, it will be appreciated. You should give children the opportunity to seek music that can be more similar to them. “
And is your dad’s music similar to yours?
“I try to take everything I stored in life with him, what I learned by singing his songs for almost twenty years. Let’s say that inside his repertoire I found so much inspiration. If I think of a song like “Cursed gossips”, my dad sang it for only two years, I take her around, with my arrangements, as eighteen. There are of his music and his texts that over the years have passed through my musical contaminations, which are absolutely not far from the originals. In reality, the two of us speak the same language. “
A language capable of giving new life to Ivan Graziani’s cultural impact; And just to highlight its topicality, one of his most famous songs can be paraphrared slightly, “Mona Lisa”. Why “Music is a great thing, especially if you teach you to love the masterpieces of the past.”
