Medusa desperately wants a cha-cha partner in one of the songs Vinicio Capossela performed at Joe’s Pub on Tuesday night, but of course there’s the petrification problem. “Touch but don’t look is a good rule to learn/Let me embrace you,” she urges. Mr. Capossela wore a golden Medusa mask as he sang, but a smile was doubtless behind it.
Vinicio Capossela in Medusa mode at Joe's Pub.
Mr. Capossela, a major star in Italy, was making his United States debut. With his scratchy voice and his fondness for various forms of oompah — waltzes, blues stomps, Kurt Weill cabaret, boleros, klezmer — Mr. Capossela is widely described as an Italian Tom Waits, and he embraces the connection. His backup band included Mr. Waits’s frequent guitarist, Marc Ribot, playing bluesy, distorted lead guitar or plunking a banjo. In the course of the set, the music also touched on tarantella, old R&B, chanson, lullaby, honky-tonk, madrigal and movie themes, just for starters.
Like Mr. Waits, Mr. Capossela sympathizes with “the drunk, the ugly, the damned,” as he sang in one song, and he can write with eloquent simplicity about love and loneliness. “I have stones in my shoes and dust on my heart/Cold in the sun and words are not enough,” he sang in the title song of his recent studio album, “Ovunque Proteggi” (“Everywhere Protect”) (Atlantic Italy).
But he also has a rhapsodic European side, delving into myth and folklore and spinning oracular free associations. He started the set with “Non Trattare” (“Do Not Bargain”), with a modal tune hinting at Arabic and medieval Italian music, and lyrics about sin and apocalypse.
Mr. Capossela’s set at the tiny Joe’s Pub scaled down the theatrical productions he mounts in Europe. Singing “Corvo Torvo” (“The Grim Crow”), he put on a top hat and flapped a feather-trimmed cape, screeching like a crow. At the end of the death-haunted love song “Con una Rosa” (“With a Rose”), he tossed rose petals into the audience. And in the course of the set, he became a grim prophet, a casual cynic, a fond suitor, a manic maharajah (in a sardonic song he dedicated to Italy’s former prime minister, presumably Silvio Berlusconi) and a pagan celebrant, shaking cowbells and wearing a Minotaur mask. (After the song, he said he was thinking about Jake LaMotta, the boxer in Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull.”)
There was desolation in many of the songs, but also a wink, a sense of delight and a broad streak of romance. Behind all the transformations was a visionary songwriter whose music stays wonderfully down to earth.
