Mango (singer)

"(About the album entitled L'albero delle Fate) In my mind, the L'Albero delle Fate is a tree that we should all climb to reach the highest branch and pick the most beautiful, most important fruit. All adults should strive to rediscover the Tree of Fairies. It is, if you like, a metaphor for the imagination we have as children but lose as we grow up. Without imagination, man is nothing."

"My roots are important. I think of a blank sheet of paper on which I draw a dot with a pencil. It is essential to be able to recognise oneself in a more general context. But if globalisation means taking into account the positive aspects of many realities, I continue to be Lucano, but I am open to what others can teach me. Therefore, as someone once said, I become a citizen of the world without losing the link with my origins."

"I am a believer in my own way: I cannot believe that everything is born and ends, otherwise life would have no reason to exist; I do not bother with divinities, I believe first and foremost in man. I do not choose this or that confession: religions create too many prejudices."

"My relationship with communication is good in some ways and disastrous in others. Those who participate in Sanremo, for example, have four minutes to tell you a little about their world. Television is a truly absurd medium, capable of destroying any type of artist."

"In Gaber, the solidarity between words and sound becomes a gesture and a place in which to push the song: and thus Teatro Canzone is born, intelligent cabaret made up of sound and satire, daily tears and ancestral smiles, artistic paintings and popular songs. With Giorgio Gaber, words traverse the space of life and passionately engage in dialectical encounter with the voice of the heart: just like those who know that words are silk pyjamas, and the night is the altar that takes on their contours."

"Words take up our fears and certainties, organising them in such a way as to give them a completely new life and colour: from time to time, they precipitate and climb them like new rural and urban destinies, as if they were mists drowned by the sun and distributed over the heads of real and uncertain men."

"(About Giorgio Gaber) A multifaceted artist to the point of confusing and mixing within himself his being a great actor and great singer, and then a mime, and then a subtle reciter, and then again a man with an unmistakable vocal timbre, marked like the brushstrokes of a great painter."

"I hate covers and the term “cover” because it means remaking songs. It's a concept that will never work because the comparison with the original, rightly considered untouchable, is inevitable, and it's also a bit stupid to make comparisons [...]. I try to discover the core of songs and make them my own with my style."

"He had a heavenly, world-class voice: if he had been born in a country other than Italy, he could have been even more successful. But he was happy at home, in Lagonegro. He was a quiet guy [...] Italian music has lost something very important, something he perhaps never fully understood. His full potential was never realised."

"I started out in the 1980s singing “Lei Verrà” in piano bars. It was one of the songs that gave me the chance to start my musical career. The news of his death is shocking. Mango will always be remembered as a great artist, because death cannot silence a voice and a song."

"I have always respected Mango, a virtuoso and decent singer, always on stage performing his art, right up to the end."

"Mango's death is one of the most touching moments I can remember. An artist who feels ill on stage, apologises to the audience for the disturbance before dying is absolutely incredible. Of course, Mango's style was far from mine, but I wanted to celebrate the person, the artist who was true to himself until the very last minute, with incredible respect for his audience."

"I didn't know him very well personally. I met him a few times, but I was enchanted by his talent and his unique voice. I saw many of his concerts. Once, at the Sistina in Rome, I was in the audience and at the end his brother Armando, whom I knew better, approached me and took me to his dressing room to meet him. I went in and saw him putting his things in a bag. He smiled at me and shook my hand with simplicity and warmth. My village is 19 km from his, which made him my closest idol. I adore his songs, his inimitable style, his notes that pierce the glass of my soul like diamonds."

"But why, in Italy, does a great artist have to die before he is recognised?"

"One of the most beautiful voices in the Mediterranean."

"He was a generous artist. He had a kind heart and exceptional sensitivity, as all of Italy saw when he felt ill on stage. He was a true Lucanian, a different kind of artist with a unique quality that cannot be found even in other great artists."

"If you listen to Mango's records now, you realise that he is a world number one."

"Mango was a unique case in Italian pop music: he was able to combine refined melodies with a touch of vocal experimentalism and a sprinkling of ethnic influences, without losing sight of rock or singer-songwriter music, genres from which he always carefully avoided drawing any effects, chords or practices that were in any way predictable."

"Metaphorically speaking, one could say that Mango plays the part of an elf who moves nimbly and stealthily in a complex architectural environment, without knocking over the crystal glassware whose exact location only he knows, in a very pictorial and never banal vocal-instrumental ensemble. In his case, one can speak of “a voice that becomes an instrument with special modulations”."