Mina Lp
Aline Braunbeck
Mina Anna Maria Mazzini OMRI (born 25 March 1940) or Mina Anna Quaini (for the Swiss civil registry),[2][4] known mononymously as Mina, is an Italian singer and actress. She was a staple of television variety shows[5] and a dominant figure in Italian pop music from the 1960s to the mid-1970s,[6] known for her three-octave vocal range,[7] the agility of her soprano voice,[7] and her image as an emancipated woman.[8]
In performance, Mina combined several modern styles with traditional Italian melodies and swing music, which made her the most versatile pop singer in Italian music.[5] With over 150 million records sold worldwide, she is the best-selling Italian musical artist.[9][10][11] Mina dominated the country's charts for 15 years and reached an unsurpassed level of popularity. She has scored 79 albums and 71 singles on the Italian charts.[12][13]
Mina's TV appearances in 1959 were the first for a female rock and roll singer in Italy. Her loud syncopated singing earned her the nickname "Queen of Screamers".[14] The public also labelled her the "Tigress of Cremona" for her wild gestures and body shakes. When she turned to light pop tunes, Mina's chart-toppers in West Germany in 1962 and Japan in 1964 earned her the title of the best international artist in these countries.[15][16][17] Mina's more refined sensual manner was introduced in 1960 with Gino Paoli's ballad "This World We Love In", which charted on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961.
Mina was banned from TV and radio in 1963 because her pregnancy and relationship with a married actor did not accord with the dominant Catholic and bourgeois morals.[18] After the ban, the public broadcasting service RAI tried to continue to prohibit her songs, which were forthright in dealing with subjects such as religion, smoking and sex.[18] Mina's cool act combined sex appeal with public smoking, dyed blonde hair, and shaved eyebrows to create a "bad girl" image.[14]
Mina's voice has distinctive timbre and great power.[19][20] Her main themes are anguished love stories performed in high dramatic tones. The singer combined classic Italian pop with elements of blues, R&B and soul music during the late 1960s,[21] especially when she worked in collaboration with the singer-songwriter Lucio Battisti. Top Italian songwriters created material with large vocal ranges and unusual chord progressions to showcase her singing skills, particularly "Brava" by Bruno Canfora (1965) and the pseudo-serial "Se telefonando" by Ennio Morricone (1966). The latter song was covered by several performers abroad. Shirley Bassey carried Mina's ballad "Grande grande grande" to charts in the U.S., UK, and other English-speaking countries in 1973. Mina's easy listening duet "Parole parole" was turned into a worldwide hit by Dalida and Alain Delon in 1974. In 1982 her disco single "Morir per te" entered in the Billboard Hot Dance/Disco Top 100.[22][23] Mina gave up public appearances in 1978 but has continued to release popular albums and musical projects on a yearly basis to the present day.
Anna Maria Mazzini[1][24] was born into a working-class family in Busto Arsizio, Lombardy.[25] The family moved to work in Cremona in her childhood. She listened to American rock and roll and jazz records and was a frequent visitor at the Santa Tecla and the Taverna Messicana clubs of Milan, both known for promoting rock and roll.[26] After finishing high school in 1958, she attended college where she majored in accounting.[25]
While on a summer holiday in Versilia on 8 August 1958, Mazzini gave an improvised performance of the song "Un'anima tra le mani" to amuse her family after a concert at the La Bussola night club.[6][27] During the following nights, Sergio Bernardini, the owner of the club, held her back in her attempts to get back on stage.[28]
In 1960, Mina made her Festival della canzone italiana in Sanremo debut with two songs. She turned to slow emotional love songs for the first time. The song " vero" ("It's True") reached No. 8 on the Italian charts.[35] Gino Paoli's song "Il cielo in una stanza" ("The Sky in a Room") marked the beginning of the young singer's transformation from a rock and roll shrieker to a feminine inspiration for cantautori.[36] The idea for the song "Love can grow at any moment at any place" had come to Paoli while lying on a bed and looking at the purple ceiling.[37] The single topped the list of annual sales in Italy[12] and reached the Billboard Hot 100[14] as "This World We Love In". Video performances of the song were included in the musicarellos Io bacio... tu baci and Appuntamento a Ischia, and in 1990, in the soundtrack of the film Goodfellas.
At the 1961 Sanremo Song Festival, Mina performed two songs. "Io amo, tu ami" ("I Love, You Love") finished fourth and "Le mille bolle blu" ("A Thousand Blue Bubbles") placed fifth.[38] Disappointed with these results, Mina declared her intention of never performing at the Sanremo song festival again.
As her songs and movies were already popular abroad, Mina started to tour Spain and Japan,[39] and performed on Venezuelan TV in 1961.[40] Mina performed on Spanish TV and at the Paris Olympia hall at the beginning of 1962.[41] The presentation of her German single "Heier Sand" on 12 March 1962 on Peter Kraus's TV show caused a boom of 40,000 record sales in ten days in Germany.[42] The record went to No. 1 and spent over half the year on the German charts in 1962.[15][43][44] Mina had six more singles on the German chart in the next two years.[15] In a listeners' poll conducted in July 1962 in Germany, Austria, and the German-speaking portion of Switzerland, Mina was voted the most popular singer in the world.[16] In May 1962, she performed in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, her version of the mambo rhythm "Moliendo Cafe" and the surf pop "Renato" peaked at No. 1 and No. 4 respectively on the Italian charts.[12] "L'eclisse twist" appeared on the flip side of "Renato", and was used on the soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni's feature film Eclipse.
Mina refused to cover up her relationship and resulting pregnancy with the married actor Corrado Pani, so her TV and radio career was interrupted by the Italian public broadcasting service RAI in 1963, as at the time divorce was not yet legal in Italy. Mina's record sales were unaffected and due to public demand, RAI ended the ban. On 10 January 1964 she returned to the TV screen on the program La fiera dei sogni, and performed the song "Citt vuota", a cover of Gene McDaniels' "It's a Lonely Town (Lonely Without You)", which was her first release on the RiFi label.[45][46] Her next single, " l'uomo per me", a cover of Jody Miller's "He Walks Like a Man", became the biggest selling record of the year in Italy.[12] Her new melodic manner[47] was demonstrated again on the 11 December 1964 TV programme Il macchiettario, where she performed "Io sono quel che sono" ("I Am What I Am"). A reminder of her previous adolescent image, her single "Suna ni kieta namida" ("Tears Disappear in the Sand"), sung in Japanese, peaked at No. 1 on the Japanese singles chart and earned Mina the title of Best International Artist in Japan.[17]
The first episode of the Studio Uno live Saturday night series showcased Mina's new blond look with shaved eyebrows.[48] The shows included the brooding songs "Un bacio troppo poco" ("One Kiss is Not Enough") and "Un anno d'amore" ("A Year of Love"),[49] a cover of Nino Ferrer's "C'est irreparable".[50] In the same series she performed "Brava" ("Good"), a rhythmic jazz number specially written by Bruno Canfora to demonstrate Mina's vocal range and performing skills.[25] Her Studio Uno album topped the Italian chart that year. Her recordings of 1965 included the scatting performance of "Spirale Waltz", the theme song for the film The 10th Victim.
Maurizio Costanzo and Ghigo De Chiara wrote the lyrics of "Se telefonando" ("If Over the Phone") as the theme for the TV program Aria condizionata in spring 1966.[51] The lyrics were composed in a dark, Hal David mode.[14] The serialist composer Ennio Morricone[52] was asked to compose the music. Mina and the three songwriters met in an RAI rehearsal room at Via Teulada, Rome. Morricone started to repeat a short musical theme of just three notes (by his term a micro-cell)[52] on an upright piano. He had copied the snippet of melody from the siren of a police car in Marseilles. After a few bars, Mina grabbed the lyrics sheet and started to sing as if she had known the tune before. Composed in this way, "Se telefonando" is a pop song with eight transitions of tonality that builds tension throughout the chorus.[7][51] Morricone's arrangement featured a sophisticated combination of melodic trumpet lines, Hal Blaine-style drumming, a string set, a 1960s Europop female choir, and intense subsonic-sounding trombones.[14]
"Se telefonando" was presented in May 1966 in a Studio Uno episode and in August the same year at Aria condizionata. The single peaked at No. 7 on the Italian chart and was 53rd in the annual list of sales. The album Studio Uno 66 featured the song as one of the standout tracks along with "Ta-ra-ta-ta" and "Una casa in cima al mondo". It was the fifth biggest-selling album of the year in Italy.[13]
In 1966, Mina started working with the Swiss Broadcasting Service and the Orchestra Radiosa in Lugano. She founded the independent record label PDU in collaboration with her father. The first record issued under the label was Dedicato a mio padre (Dedicated to My Father). Mina's growing interest in Brazilian music resulted in "La banda" ("The Band"), a Chico Buarque song, which reached No. 3 in Italy. Mina continued to perform on Italian TV, and presented "Zum zum zum" on the spring 1967 variety series Sabato sera, accompanied by the NATO naval band. The series also included "La coppia pi bella del mondo" ("The Most Beautiful Couple in the World"), a duet with Adriano Celentano. The title of the song "Sono, come tu mi vuoi" ("I Am, as You Want Me to Be") was taken from Luigi Pirandello's play Come tu mi vuoi. The lyrics talk about the manic attention of the press on an artist's private life.[53] Another hit from Sabato sera was "L'immensit" ("Immensity"), which was re-scored by Augusto Martelli and released as "La inmensidad" in Spain and Latin American countries.[54]