A tribute to Pino Mango

Mediterraneo and La Rondine, two songs by Mango joined into a single piece. Arranged in G minor with a prepared tuning (from the first string: D, B♭, G, D, G, D).

Mango's songs have a sound of their own, thanks to his voice and the way he used it, with falsetto and leaps up into the high register, often an octave, that keep the melody nimble and never rhetorical. Another feature I noticed in his songs, especially in the harmony, is the use of modal scales, which give an exotic, sunny flavour even to the harmonically simpler pieces.

The video

I made this video with Dante De Marco, combining my guitar with images of a stormy sea and of Mango himself in a performance taken from a music video. I started with «Mediterraneo»: my first live performance of it was in December 2015, at a Christmas concert in Rome. I like to keep reworking my arrangements, because a piece is rarely finished: I often have new ideas to add or a bar to change. That happened here too: a first video came out in July 2017, while the one in this article was made for the anniversary of Mango's death.

An artist never dies

An artist lives on through his art, his songs and the many videos online. Unlike other great names of Italian pop, I don't think Mango got the media attention he deserved: his pop is probably too refined for mass taste, which goes to lesser names pushed by national and local radio and TV. I thought about it on long car journeys, politely letting others choose the station: the same songs come round many times a day, sometimes minutes apart, almost a hammering, as if they wanted to drive the song into your head like a nail. I should say my own radio is permanently tuned to Radio 3… for obvious reasons.