As Time Goes Vividly By

The image of Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Conte that appears on his first U.S.-released album seems to be from another era. His face, with cigarette smoke curling around his gray mustache and deep creases in the skin, is clearly one that has seen a lot of life. It’s not hard to envision him in a World War II nightclub like Rick’s Cafe Americain, seated at a worn piano singing sardonic songs about the human condition.

However, Conte, who makes his Los Angeles debut at the Conga Room on Oct. 25, was born in 1937, making his connection with the ‘30s and ‘40s a spiritual one at best.

But not a nostalgic one.

“The ‘20s and the ‘30s are the periods that have influenced me the most in all the arts--jazz, theater and film,” he says. “Especially the great black-and-white American and French films and, in Italian cinema, [Roberto] Rossellini. The idea of telling a story in a three- or four-minute song takes a great deal from cinema, inasmuch as there are very quick flashes and movement in the storytelling.”

Which is a pretty good description of what takes place in Conte’s songs. Epigrammatic, often filled with quick-take images, underscored with surging jazz rhythms, they are quintessential distillations of the cultural encounter between poetry and jazz, between the dark images of European night life and the optimistic energies of American jazz.

“The music went on,” he sings in “Boogie.” “A song that meant something and nothing/The band swayed/Like a palm tree by the venerated sea.”

And, in “Sotto le Stelle del Jazz” (Under the Stars of Jazz), he adds, “Not too many could understand jazz/There were too many wrong ties/Ape boys of jazz/That’s the way we were, that’s the way we were.”

How will intriguing songs such as these impact American audiences? Apparently very effectively--at least on the East Coast. Reviews of his album “Paolo Conte” and of his New York appearances in 1998 were, to say the least, upbeat.

“Listening to these songs,” wrote Amy Gamerman in the Wall Street Journal, “is like having a Fellini movie poured in your ear.”

And David Fricke, writing in Rolling Stone, described Conte’s voice as having “the ruined urgency of Tom Waits and the autumnal aplomb of Leonard Cohen.”

Conte is happy for the East Coast recognition, and pleased that his music was included in the recent Hugh Grant film “Mickey Blue Eyes.” Now he’s eager to experience his first visit to the West Coast, which he views as the part of the country that “gives us the greatest sense of American culture.”

“More than that,” he adds, “as a European, the literature of the West Coast seems to me to be more typically American, especially when it comes to the work of writers such as Charles Bukowski and singer-songwriters like Randy Newman. There is a sense of humor and a way of saying things that comes from West Coast literature that I find interesting and that has had a real impact upon my writing.”

Although Conte has been a recording artist since 1974, and a major European artist since 1979, it has only been in the past decade that he has concentrated solely on music. A civil lawyer since his 20s, he continues even now to maintain a law office.

“I liked being a lawyer,” he explains, “and I liked studying law. But when you have the desire within you to compose music, this passion of yours is stronger than the work that you carry out as a lawyer. And in that sense, I would say that I’ve had some difficulties in having the two careers. . . . But at the same time, there is certainly some exposure to human life that I have had in my experience as a lawyer that has contributed to my writings.”

Conte pauses for a moment, reconsidering the thought. Then with the sort of gravelly voiced afterthought that frequently crops up in his songs, he adds, “But, you know, had I only studied music, I might have been less embattled, if you will, in my own identity. I might not have had this internal battle within myself, and the songs might have been different.”

But probably not the music, with its tenacious undercurrent of jazz. His eight-piece backing group includes a four-man horn section, and his arrangements stretch across the entire pre-bop jazz period, with stride piano and boogie-woogie making particularly strong appearances.

Conte’s musical tastes were developed early, in his family’s home in Asti, a small Northern Italian town.

“Jazz was a great passion that was born for me when I was young,” he says. “I had the privilege in my family that--even during the years of fascism, when American music was prohibited--my mother and father were able to obtain, in one way or another, sheet music or records. So I was able to hear this music--Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman--at a very early age.”

Despite his affection for jazz, Conte has had a persistent problem connecting the music’s rhythms with his poetic imagery, in part because of the nature of the Italian language.

“The truth is,” he says, “that I was born as a writer of music, and I’ve had some difficulties writing my texts, probably because I’ve always tried to make the text sound like the music. And that has created trouble with versification, because, although the Italian language is a very beautiful language, very suited for opera, it has very little swing.”

No more swing than one would find, say, in a legal brief, either. But Conte seems to have effectively solved both problems, with his songs finding an ample source of swing in his briskly rhythmic use of the language, and his entertaining performances light-years away from the formality of the courtroom.

“What can I say?” Conte says with a chuckle. “I’m just happy that the battle between the artistic life and the life as a lawyer was won by the artistic life.”

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Paolo Conte plays Oct. 25 at the Conga Room, 5364 Wilshire Blvd., 9 p.m. $30. (323) 938-1696.