Interview - Alberto Fortis
by Stefania Vittoria Arcari
by Stefania Vittoria Arcari
[Stefania Vittoria Arcari] Where do your discipline and your rigor come from?
[Alberto Fortis] I was a Rosminian student; I attended the classical liceo of the college in Domodossola as an external student, then I went on to the Faculty of Medicine in Milan, passing anatomy, physiology, pathology… demanding exams. There was an air of medicine at home, because my father and my cousins were all doctors. A cousin on my mother’s side opened the first Italian thoracic surgery department at Niguarda Hospital in ’56. At home you breathed this sense of duty which, “when you are a boy,” is also rather heavy. Even so, that feeling always stimulated the sensory side of perception that I feel so strongly in art and that led me to write in a certain way, to form myself through writing lyrics.
[SVA] How did you first encounter words?
[AF] The very first thing I wrote in one go, probably because of an emotional and sensory convergence as well, had a precise motivation: I lost my mother when I was young and made this very strange switch. I went from the drums, which I had played since I was five, to the piano, all at once. That is where Tra Demonio E Santità was born, a kind of personal Faust, the struggle of life between good and evil, but one that owed a great deal to the study of the Divina Commedia, which had been passed on to us with great passion. Hence the synthesis of the word, because in two lines Dante concentrates meaning and vision. That synthesis between word and image, which for me becomes music.
[SVA] As in Nyente Da DiRe?
[AF]“E nascondersi col proposito di morte tra le bucce e la verdura
ritrovarsi a pezzettini su una tavola imbandita
dove ci sarai anche tu e tutti i tuoi invitati
che mi mangeranno con le loro grandi, grosse e unte dita…”
[SVA] And your encounter with the image?
[AF] The image has always been an extremely strong element for me. Because the key, the key word in art but also in life, is fantasy. Without fantasy, without imagination, without utopia, what would Leonardo be? Man would never have dreamed of flying, and even today we would not have an immaterial network through which to communicate. The strength of writing a lyric comes when the song becomes a video, because you see it. For my own taste, I started with the great masters, with the French line of Jacques Brel, who influenced the whole Genoese school, and then arrived at the Beatles and Bob Dylan, undeniably cornerstones in the history of music, who, with different colors, made you “see” the song. Think of the Rolling Stones too, or of Strawberry Fields Forever. You see a universe of images through the words. They are the gems of music, because music is this alchemy, a subtle balance between image, word, and sound.
[SVA] Have you ever lived through a moment you consider revelatory, a moment “of destiny”?
[AF] In the 1980s. I am in Los Angeles and go to see a band I was following at the time, formed by Abraham Laboriel and Alex Acuña — Pop Rock Fusion — and it was a moment of destiny: I go to hear them in a very small club called Baked Potato. With all the shyness I had back then, I make this move. I go up to Abraham Laboriel — one of the first great bass players — and say to him: “Congratulations, I would love to make an album with you.” Naturally, I expected to be brushed off, but instead Abraham takes out his business card and says: “Call us.” At that moment nobody was giving me any credit; instead, I call, I send a demo, and we set off, with all the responsibility that entailed, to make this album in Los Angeles, which would become La grande grotta. It was an explosion of success. I was truly happy but also inhibited, because Stevie Wonder’s session ended in the morning and in the afternoon, at One Step Studio, we were there recording everything live. But the moment the recording tapes started rolling, all the fears disappeared: it was the strength of that understanding, of the language, of art, of music. Settembre was the most important success of that record. Until the mid-1980s, in the Anglo-Saxon and American world there was a small technological advantage, and you could count on a very high level of technical expertise, above all where the culture of sound was concerned. So there it was: the turn of destiny and a difficult bet won thanks to the thirst to experiment — new territories, new collaborations, new studios, and above all different cities. Perhaps the most singular place I have played was on the Native American reservations. For years I have followed the Navajo cause, as a UNICEF ambassador. In that period, during my Los Angeles baptism, I was trying to make even uncomfortable ideas converge with my music — I tend to make these things live together. La Neña del Salvador also told of the civil war in that small country, little known at the time, the size of Piedmont. I always respond to what is happening around me; I believe deeply in the strength of art in the service of a community, of a cause. “Quanta strada rimpianta esiste… la vita è un posto a prezzi alti…” (Ricordati di Me).
[SVA] At your concerts you like to repeat a line by Osho.
[AF] I have even been to his ashram. There is a concept of Osho’s that says: “Our lives are not merchandise to be thrown onto the market.” That alone is fundamental. But he adds: “I am a flower growing at the roadside, asking nothing of anyone” — and I free myself from any kind of imposition or pressure — “but always ready to be picked by whoever truly knows how to recognize me.” The code of recognition between like-minded people, which for me is an essential human code, encloses fundamental themes in a simple sentence. The work that Michelangelo Pistoletto gave me, a video-mantra for preventive peace, says the same: “do not kill, do not kill.” In these dark times, where Saruman’s tower seems to be winning with its army of orcs of evil, it is a positive sign, an act of opposition to the corridors of power of the world’s “pandits,” to the prison of the negative. Naïve too, if you like, but necessary. Because, as Woody Allen would say, if “karma is not a detergent,” then clearly something will have to come back around. And yet, in spite of the shadows, it is in my nature to see the good opening. I try to see the glass half full, and so perhaps that “smokescreen” we have had around us for years is fading, as if it were a mesh of pixels, and today we see the substance of things more clearly.
[SVA] How does inspiration come about?
[AF] It is a question of how you are born, because there is a predisposition. A person can become a musician through a great deal of study, taking singing lessons, but the spark, the flash, is something you have inside you. As with any artistic or professional expression, it comes precisely from this DNA. Naturally, what changes afterward is how you metabolize it all, how you elaborate it and give it form.
[SVA] And your relationship with the body?
[AF] I am a Gemini, with a Scorpio ascendant that is very carnal, very physical, but on the whole my element is air. I feel it strongly on stage, when there is that natural trance with yourself; for me, that is the most vital, most extraordinary aspect.
[SVA] In one of your recent songs, Venezia, you also speak of a heat map. What is heat for you?
[AF] Heat is precisely the first spark, one of the strongest ways of recognizing the bodily activity of the human being, and therefore something primordial, in the most vital sense. Every living being gives off heat, and I understand it also as an expression of perception. A heat map manages to capture bodily emanation and also what kind of empathy you can feel with a person. It is a map that, multiplied by all the individual units, constitutes a collectivity, and therefore a city. When I was living in the United States, in Washington, I went to see the thermographic map, which monitors every area that heats up at the level of life itself. It is striking. Physical heat is the tangible, physical sign of life itself.
[SVA] In your Venezia there is also a lot of anger, disenchantment, but you speak of a Holy Grail. What is the sacred for you?
[AF] In Il Duomo di Notte, and in Venezia too, the Grail is a search. It also calls up a mystical, religious dimension, when we speak of prophets, of animism, of journeys into the heart of man.
“E la vera ragione delle notti impegnate, dei romanzi creduti, degli amori sbagliati
Non la devi cercare dentro i mari delusi, che ti scusano i sogni, le ignoranze, i delitti
Il suo posto lo trovi nella ruota del giorno, Nello scrigno privato di egoismi e di abusi…” (Il Duomo di Notte).
[SVA] In your shows and videos you often dress up. Do you like playing with fashion?
[AF] Let me tell you an anecdote: as a young man I modeled for Romeo Gigli, who then gave me a beautiful coat, floor-length, almost princely. Which fortunately I still have. Clothing is a strong signal that communicates who you are, your very being. I like certain labels partly because fashion lets you step into a suit of armor: a positive action that creates a map of convergences, not only on the aesthetic, “fatuous” side of vanity, but also on the recognition between like-minded people. What you wear on stage says, in three seconds, at least fifty percent of what you are, or of what you want to say about yourself. Fashion does not interest me as a snobbish “bubble” of style for its own sake, as an affectation, but as good taste, another sense of beauty.
[SVA] Off stage, if you had to suggest a song for driving… Do you drive?
[AF] I like driving; these days I am often driven around, so I drive less, but I did write a song called Due file, because once I was in the car, stuck in traffic heading to the sea, and I was watching these couples sitting there in the line of traffic, not talking to each other. Five minutes can be very long for two people who do not exchange a word.
“…e tutti su due file divisi da chi non sa più dire amore
su due file divisi da chi non sa più
cercava tra la gente la libertà
non gli importava niente di un’estate di anni fa” (Due file).
[SVA] You often make references to food and banquets—even in one of your latest songs, “Nyente Da DiRe”.Do you have a good relationship with cooking?
[AF] Cooking is not really my thing, but during Covid I tried my hand at it. In the family house in Domodossola, where I was born and grew up for seventeen years, I cooked whatever there was with the few pans available and surprised myself by making more than decent things. Then I found myself talking about it with musician friends who told me that cooking has the same approach as an arrangement.