Paolo Conte’s Charismatic Performance Surpasses Genre

It wasn’t hard to find reference points in Paolo Conte’s performance at UCLA’s RoyceHall on Sunday night. Jacques Brel, Yves Montand, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen were a few of the names that came easily to mind during the Italian singer-songwriter’s collection of original works.

There was some of the elegance of Montand, a trace of Cohen’s poetic irony, the careful songwriting craft of Brel--all delivered in a husky, world-weary, Waits-like growl. But at its heart, it was all Conte.

He delivered most of his songs while seated at a grand piano, occasionally supplementing his vocals with brief ornamental passages on a kazoo. It’s a bit hard to understand what Conte finds appealing about the burlesque sounds produced on the tiny device, and its appearance inevitably drew awkward titters of laughter from the capacity crowd.

The kazoo aside, he sang with great effectiveness, sometimes chopping his phrases into dramatic bursts, using the contrast between sounds and silence to theatrically emphasize the poetry of his lyrics.

With a few exceptions, the songs came from his extensive repertoire, many of them drawn from a recently released greatest-hits album, typically ranging across the full gamut of his interests.

There were tango rhythms, snatches of New Orleans jazz, lots of Swing-style tunes (from the pre-World War II era that interests him the most), as well as a few tunes in French. English-language song titles and words often came bursting through--” ’S Wonderful,” “Hemingway,” “Oh yeah!”

But even a slight understanding of Italian (or French or Spanish, for that matter) illuminated some of the lyrics in tunes such as “Via Con Me,” “Gelato di Limon” and “Razmataz.” Despite Conte’s charismatic presence, there were a couple of problems with the performance. The first was location. Conte makes regular concert stage appearances, but the dark ambience of a nightclub is his natural setting, and his appearance at the Conga Room in 1999 had a far more appropriate feeling.

The second was the repetitious quality of many of his arrangements. Although they were performed superbly by an eight-piece ensemble working in seamlessly supportive fashion, too many of the numbers alternated repeating horn passages with Conte’s vocal segments.

At its best, however, this was an evening of rare entertainment from an artist who is simply beyond genre. Dipping into whatever interests him, from sources ranging across nearly a century, Conte produced music whose appeal flowed from an insistence that imagination and creativity are beyond categorization.