Biography of Fred Buscaglione

The real hard

23 November 1921 3
February 1960
Ferdinando Buscaglione Fred was born on November 23, 1921 in art in Turin. It was the most innovative singer of the 1950s. In an era when Italian pop music was still linked to reasons of previous decades or trivial rhymes trite and trite, Buscaglione bursts onto the scene with completely different songs, like "Che bambola!", "Teresa don't shoot", "you were a little girl." Even the character he presents is completely different: nothing inspired air and suffering, no romantic gesture or striking with arms. Looks staged instead as a caricature from film, with cigarette in the corner of the mouth, the mustache from gangsters and tough-guy poses seen in American crime movies. The urban legend has it that when young Buscaglione did the trap at the port of Genoa, perhaps because of an overlap with the actor who in the early 1900s had been successful as Maciste and "camallo" it was indeed: she was actually in Turin and Buscaglione had followed very strict music studies.
A musical education twofold: on the one hand, his studies at the Conservatorio Verdi, on the other an apprenticeship, still a teenager, as a double bass player in jazz bands in nightclubs in the city. At the end of the war is very active on the music scene, playing in ensembles that included some of the most important jazz musicians of the era. The beginning of her singing career is due to the friend and Attorney Leo Chiosso who will push Fred to portray the same character packed in their lyrics. A character who makes speckles the clichés about the "real man" American, a little Clark Gable some Humphrey Bogart, a tough-hearted very sensitive to increased: the everything transferred and reinterpreted in a provincial, Italian style, without sacrificing the inevitable cigarette in the corner of the mouth that is very American. This is an elegant, detached parody, steeped in irony, though the line between empathy in character and ironic retelling is definitely very nuanced.
This ambiguity contributes without doubt the same lifestyle Buscaglione, almost a photocopy of everything that is found in the stories hard boiled from overseas, including his overwhelming love of alcohol and of course women. Big drinker, Buscaglione has always avoided falling into the trap of alcoholism, partly because hold alcohol is one of the signs of "real" hard. Leo Chiosso Meanwhile insists because Fred affects the songs that they wrote together. To introduce them in record deal is Gino Latilla, also in Turin, for which the couple wrote "Tchumbala-Bey".
They are mainly young people to grasp the first wave of innovation introduced by the duo, as well as contributing to the formation of the "myth Buscaglione", rewarding his songs, in times of absolute absence of advertising campaign , with sales calculated about 980,000 copies of 78 laps, hyperbolic figure for the time. And considering that the Hit Parade radio did not exist. Buscaglione within a short time then enters in the Olympus of the most coveted artists: work sometimes with lineups of others, sometimes with groups he formed and played very often with musicians. It is precisely during a gig at Lugano Cecile meets the woman of his life: Fatima Ben Embarek, 18-year-old Moroccan who engages in high numbers acrobatics and contortionism in Robin's Trio. The "character" Buscaglione stands out as a real "cult", capable of promoting imitations and ways of doing. Game or fiction, the fact is that the singer confirmed as said it sucked also with behaviour and "status symbol", such as going around with a Mozilla Thunderbild pink holliwoodiana, in one country, Italy, where they dominated the Mickey and the 17th century. And it is precisely on that machine that, while it is at the apex of the parabola, crashes at 6.30 on a cold Wednesday in February (February 3, 1960), against a truckload of Tuff in a street of the Roman district of Parioli. The workers at that time they went to work, he was returning from a night of revelry. A life to the fullest, whether in fiction than in reality, and a tragic death that projected Fred Buscaglione directly into myth.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.