Disco Italia

Dado, Gala, and Jestofunk

by Michael Freedberg

At first glance it seems farfetched to assert that now is Italy's time in music land. The only current Italian pop star known to the big US audience is Andrea Bocelli. But disco fans have always taken a fancy to the Italian pop style, and more Italian hits have taken the pulse of US dance floors this season than ever before. From singles like Gala's "Freed from Desire," Babe Instinct's "Disco Babes from Outer Space," and Paradisio's "Bailando" to the full-lengths Universal Mother (Irma America) by Jestofunk and Greatest Hits and Future Bits (Dance Factory/Priority) by DJ Dado, the sound of Italian dance pop -- electronically mellow, dreamy, and fast -- keeps on coming. Club DJs use the music to death; raves turn to it whenever their harsh noises thirst for sugar. But nothing in the sound inventory of standard US pop resembles the polished joys and speedy sighs of Italy.

Italian pop shuns irony and reduces deconstruction to sound effects, reaching back to the Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder romance machine and the polished orchestrations of the Brill Building. It does, however, have a place for soulfulness. Disco idol Loleatta Holloway singing Fire Island's cover of Style Council's "Shout It to the Top" dominated Italian clubs earlier this year. Two other diva struts worth noting are Ralphi Rosario's "Take Me Up (Gotta Get Up)" and DJ Dado's "Give Me Love" (featuring house diva Michelle Weeks). Both tracks are part of the compilation La Primavera (EastWest Italy). (One La Primavera track, the Tamperer featuring Maya's "Feel It," has even made it to WFNX's Spin Cycle.)

The most notable La Primavera artists are Gala and Dado. On her new CD, Come into My Life (Do It Yourself, Italy), the Milan-based Gala Rizzatto displays a bluesy, wistful tone not unlike Sade's or Everything But the Girl's. Her beats are garage-style house, a delicate touch that emphasizes the vulnerability in her vocals even as her downbeat tone spotlights her toughness. Her "Freed from Desire" became the underground dance hit of last year, rising to heavy rotation on NYC's WKTU-FM. "Suddenly," with its fast delights and abundance of Shangri-Las-like hooks, should do even better.

DJ Dado's Greatest Hits and Future Bits lacks the bluesy subtlety of Gala's music. It moves in the dreamy/sexy Donna-and-Giorgio direction most typical of Italian pop. Indeed, Dado has brought back an entire universe of first-generation disco features. In his 14 tracks you'll hear the soundtrack thump of Meco Monardo ("X-Files Theme" and "Mission Impossible Theme"), the sultry-lady vocals and orchestrations of Cerrone ("Revenge"), and sweet-and-tickle sounds typical of '70s dance nerds like Kid Creole and Boris Midney. His leading ladies sing in English but with a sexy, exotic accent: they're distant lovers, as hard to get hold of as the music of his flights through inner space. The CD also features his big hit, "Give Me Love," a song whose diva vocals and beats recall C & C Music Factory's.

Dado and Gala represent the sound of Milan, a postmodern city full of businessmen with briefcases, cell-phoned dealmakers, supermodel wanna-bes, and enough trendy discos to stud the pages of a hundred fashion magazines. It's only part of the Italian pop story. Two hundred and fifty miles to the east lies the Adriatic Riviera, a beach zone where discos line the main road all the way from Byzantine Ravenna to the sin pits of Fellini's home town, Rimini. Here's a harder, blacker dance sound than anything the ideal romanticists of Milan had in mind. The DJ sound of "Adriatic Funk," as IRMA Records' president Umbi Damiani calls it, has "soul music in mind." A five-CD Irma compilation called Sotterranea collects 119 tracks from Adriatic funk's source records -- house from NYC, Eurotechno, Boy George and his imitators, and electro-dance comedies à la Italy's best early-'80s disco band, Kano.

Adriatic funk is heard to best advantage on Jestofunk's two CDs, Universal Mother and Love in Black Dimension (both Irma America). Claudio Rispoli, who with bandmates Francesco Farias and Alessandro "Blade" Staderini creates Jestofunk music, spent two decades DJing on the Adriatic Riviera as DJ Moz-art. He developed his own funk sound, a mixture of Zapp's vocoder, James Brown horns, Funkadelic syncopations, Rastafarian toasts, and enough Moroderish techno effects to splash away one's summer sweat. Rispoli's grooves are unmistakably graphic, with beats and bass lines jostling the singer forward, like a wall-to-wall crowd dancing shoulder-to-hip. Jestofunk's guest singers include Jamaica's Freddie McGregor, newcomer Felix, diva Jocelyn Brown, and CeCe Rogers, whose big voice is perfect for Rispoli's gospelly house grooves. The songs preach a message (get happy, fight the power, peace), and -- again a soul-music standard -- get way down just as fervently as they preach high.

But if Rispoli's soul-music focus is uniformly restorationist, his complex groove contexts sure aren't. There's been nothing in rhythm music to compare with his appetite for riffs and hooks from outer space since Parliament-Funkadelic. Which is why Jestofunk and their Sotterranea companions ensure that the beaches of Rimini merit as hollowed a place as Ibiza and Miami in club-dance heaven.