Nives

Artist: Nives

LP: Nives
Song: "Marinaio (Sailor)"
[ listen ]

Here's one of my favorite tracks from the 1968 U.S. debut LP from Italian singer Nives. My quick web search this morning didn't turn up much info on the singer, but on the back of the album there are two sets of effusive and enigmatic notes, written by swarthy young Italian men with unbuttoned shirts, scruffy beards, necklaces made of wooden beads and thick dark curls of wayward hair that intermittently fell forward over their faces as they wrote, only to be brushed roughly back behind the ears again so that these notes could be completed. that's how I picture it, anyway.

Nives is not a singer, she is a provocation. You cannot close your
eyes when listening to her voice. You are compelled to open
them and awaken, startled, into reality; not that kind of reality
more evidnet and anonymous—the neon lights, the advertising
signs—but the most alive and personal one made up of our small
and big disillusions, of our individual and collective hopes, of the
words that printed papers hammer inside us, of the love for life and
the horror of violence that daily and always more senselessly
covers the earth with blood.

It is a voice speaking about Presidents, flowers, soldiers (her
first songs) but also about feelings which, differing from the
old traditional schemes, face the wider emotions and considerations
of finding oneself among the others and meeting the others in
ourselves. A lovesong (a word that has been misguided with years
of creative poorness) in Nives regains dignity and human value.

Love is not meant to rhyme with heart. In the Italian language,
love is amore and heart is cuore but it's a kind of love which is
inside us and that comes out through Nives' voice to reach
many, all of us. --Tato Queirolo

* * * * * * *

To make music is a way to live and to stick to life. This I always
thought, at least confusedly. But I must say that knowing Nives
has made me completely convinced.

What struck me in her is not so much the timbre of voice as her
absolute participation in the act of "singing." I believe that
this involvement of hers is just what makes working with her
interesting and difficult at the same time.

Nives forces you to take part in her musical world without giving
you the possibility of accepting compromises on what she,
by instinct, feels she must accomplish immediately.

This way, working with her is like trying to channel a lava flow,
or limiting something enormous in a small space.

In short, one cannot record her voice only. Instead, one has
to lift her up bodily, the same way she resolves herself into
her astonishing voice, and thrust her into the record by force.
This is, briefly, what we have tried to do. --Mario De Sanctis