For over 40 years he has abandoned the limelight, but not the recording room.
And so, as has become an almost inevitable tradition, Mina returns again this year - during which she celebrated her 80th birthday - with a work that enhances and rediscovers the Italian songbook.
A gift to fans, but also to herself, to her personal tastes, to her greatest successes, to those less known.
On November 27th the double album "Italian Songbook" is released, the first chapter of a project of six total anthologies, as explained by his son Massimiliano Pani, in the role of producer "of the most famous unknown in Italy", as defined by the interpreter par excellence.
Italian Songbook is the union of "Cassiopea" (PDU / distr. Sony Music) and "Orione" (PDU / distr. Warner Music) and retraces and rearranges the artist's immense repertoire.
A firmament of over 1400 songs in over 100 albums, in which the 30 songs of the two discs have been fished (five have been "reopened" as they say in the jargon: At least you in the universe, Songs out of tune, The sky in a room, A long love story, Me tomorrow).
A journey into a variegated world (from 1975 with The important is ending to 2018 with I wanted to write you for a long time), between great successes and lesser-known pearls (all digitized and restored), following the thread of taste and desires of Mina herself, who personally worked on the project, without an apparent logical thread but letting himself be guided by his personal taste.
Songs that she sings for the first time or resumed after the interpretation of other voices;
and two previously unreleased tracks, which close the two tracklists.
For Cassiopea there is "A small time", written by Antonio Gaudino, Alberto Laurenti and Franco Califano, interpreted by Mina with the reworked text of the version of Tiromancino (2005);
Orione, on the other hand, ends with "Nel cielo dei bars" written by Leo Chiosso and Fred Buscaglione, who interpreted it in the film "Noi duri", which re-proposes jazz atmospheres.
Interpretations that restore, at the age of 80, his voice without wrinkles and timeless.
"It was a work of collecting and choosing to make pieces perhaps no longer accessible again - says Pani -. The idea was to take his successes, not to make them a best of, together with great Italian successes and pearls that according to her they did not have the right light when they came out.
They are the pieces that Mina wants to reproduce you, make you listen to. She has always done only what she wanted to do, showing courage and intelligence ".
And an extraordinary ability to grapple with unusual challenges, from the choice of the repertoire to the duets, passing through the thousand declinations to which he has bent and tamed his voice.
Even songs that boast dozens of remakes, in his version look like new masterpieces.
"Sometimes he sees a diamond even in works already stripped of the covers.
He has the ability to understand which piece deserves a re-reading".
Cassiopeia and Orione ("names chosen because volumes 1, 2, 3 and so on, it seems ugly", jokes Pani) will be followed by other discs, probably annually.
"The next one could go and fish out the sixties, but his repertoire is such as to give us infinite possibilities: latin, tango, bossanova songbook.
Or songs in Neapolitan or duets", underlines Pani, who prefers to talk about the artist Mina, more than of Mina mother who still today does not stop being curious and looking for stimuli.
"When they propose a song to her - and each receives 3-4 thousand - she looks for something interesting. The songs" alla Mina "bore her immediately. She seeks the change of register, the challenge.
She enjoys taking different directions and doing that he believes in. As he always has. "
Pani tells how Mina is an attentive listener of music: "between her and my 16-year-old son there is a fruitful exchange: he introduced her to Bruno Mars and Billie Eilish. She Chet Baker. But she doesn't waste time with things that don't. interest ".
And then he removes a pebble from his shoe when he is reminded that last year Mina was named as artistic director of the Sanremo Festival: "an idea that Rai liked so much, that it never called anyone" .
It is useless to try to ask if it will reappear in public.
"She is stronger than her public persona. She can even do without Mina."
(HANDLE).
