Ornella Vanoni has expressed more than one wish for her funeralamong them there is also a choice of music. The singer, who died yesterday at the age of 91, had asked jazz trumpeter and friend Paolo Fresu to play for him on the day of the funeral.
The same musician interviewed by the news of the Sardinian broadcaster ‘Videolina’, when asked if he would play at the funeral of Ornella Vanoni answered: “I must”. Recalling the request that came to him from Vanoni himself in May 2020, Fresu later explained: “Jokingly, when he asked me, I told him ‘fine, but if I die first you have to sing at my funeral’. We often talk about it” but “for me it remains something very intimate and represents the great respect and friendship that exists between us. I was very surprised by his firmness in thinking about tomorrow”.
Paolo Fresu, who is he?
Paolo Fresu was born in 1961. He started his musical studies at the age of eleven, together with the musical band ‘Bernardo De Muro’ in Berchidda. In Sassari he attended Luigi Canepa’s conservatory and discovered his greatest passion: jazz.
In 1982 he started his professional activity with recordings for Rai and participation in the seminar ‘Siena jazz’. He graduated in trumpet in 1984 and continued his activities by devoting himself to mixed jazz projects.
Since 1988, in his hometown of Berchidda, he has organized and directed Time in Jazz, an annual international jazz music festival. Paul Fresu was also the artistic director of the Nuoro Jazz Seminar from 1989 to 2013 and the Bergamo Jazz festival from 2009 to 2011. In 2010 he founded the record label Tŭk Music.
Letter to Ornella
Fresu chose to pay tribute to the great Italian singer with a long letter. The two were good friends, linked by deep human and artistic ties. “Write something, I ask myself on this empty November morning. And I’m here pouring scattered thoughts onto a sheet of words while thinking about our first meeting at Tangram in Milan in the early nineties and how many times we laughed, cried, sang and played during these thirty years. It’s almost impossible to talk about Ornella”, wrote Fresu.
“It is impossible”, for her, “to describe a rich life made up of successes and triumphs, falls, ascents and passions. Write something, but what? Perhaps the best way is to find an adjective. A contemporary screenshot capable of translating that image into a collective imagination of her as a woman and an artist that will always belong to all of us. Ornella is the emotion of life. Hers and ours. Capable of locating solitude and passion, love for oneself and others, the pathos and poetry that (perhaps) will save the world”.
For Fresu, Ornella Vanoni was “an elusive woman who hated the obvious and the superficial. An artist who shattered the delicate balance between art and life and who made the stage his home where he hosted and channeled human feelings.” The letter continues by recalling several anecdotes: “The clock announced that it was time to leave for Milan. I filed away some of these thoughts and turned off the computer with the realization that I hadn’t been able to write what I wanted. For example she trembles like a leaf before going on stage which she then faces like a lioness. Or the weekly phone call with his distinctive voice that always starts with ‘how are you?’ or those with my mother or with my wife Sonia”.
And again, continues Fresu, “he undressed with his eyes people he didn’t like to give them trouble, a concert held in solidarity in the Pavese school yard where my son goes to primary school or a concert in the yard of Fabrizio De André’s house at six in the afternoon where he, barefoot, said ‘it never occurred to me to sing at snack time'”. And then the request that Vanoni made to him: “In May 2020, in front of the same school as my son, he asked me to call me at his funeral. On that sunny morning our friendship grew stronger until, some time ago, he asked me to hold his hand during the conferment of the Honorary Degree”.
Now, continues the musician, “I’m on Frecciarossa speeding through the fog of the Po Valley. I reopen the computer and realize that I have to write again but my mind is too busy. Maybe we should just fly between the words and in the memory of his music between Brecht and Vinicius, Tenco, Fossati and Paoli. Ornella has been flying all his life. Sometimes burning his wings but always rising and soaring ever higher. Just as we do every time we listen to his extraordinary and unmistakable voice again. The last time was in Bologna in March when, in ‘The Man I Love’ arranged by Celso Valli, she sounded like Billie Holiday.”
He then concluded: “As I entered Centrale di Milan, the city, I put the computer in my backpack convinced that I had not yet achieved my goal.. I only know that the world has lost a unique voice that responded, like Raphael, Miles and Vinicius, to one name: Ornella”.
