A New Spiritualism Guides Gino Vannelli -
Gary Graff, Detroit Journal Music Writer - October 6th, 1995
Gino Vannelli has pulled into Atlanta on a particularly eventful day.
The Atlanta Braves are preparing for their first game of the baseball playoffs (they won). But this excitement didn't touch Vannelli. "You know," he says, "I was just too busy. Everybody knew where the deliberations were at, but that was about it." Ah yes, the deliberations. The O.J. Simpson trial. The verdict. How did Vannelli view all that? "I don't know," he offers. "Nobody is ever really going to know for sure. No matter what I say or you say, we weren't there. All I can say is I wouldn't want to be him right now."
Actually, Vannelli is perfectly happy being himself these days. And it's not quite the same Gino Vannelli you might remember from the '70s -- he of the bared, hair-covered chest belting out love songs over a dense backdrop of synthesizers. Vannelli has in recent years found God. And Buddah. And a new musical direction. As he puts it in on song from his new album, "Yonder Tree," Vannelli has found "Jehovah and All that Jazz."
"I do not believe in any one direction," Vannelli, 43, says of the intensive spiritual search he began during the late '70s. "All directions finally converge if you're far enough down the line. I believe myself to be at a point where I know clearly the challenge of bringing a more spiritual consciousness into my dense brain here. "Whether it's religion or philosophy or whatever, it's like peeling onions; you do one layer at a time. If you try to pierce it, you're not going to make it. It will be too rich or too pungent. You'll literally blow up."
It was, in fact, a kind of personal implosion that sent Vannelli scrambling for some meaning beyond music. The Montreal native claimed a niche in the '70s pop pastiche with his lushly orchestrated -- bombastic, even -- hits such as "People Gotta Move" and 1978's massive "I Just Wanna Stop." Vannelli, it turns out, did want to stop around that time. Even though he had a few hits in the '80s -- "Living Inside Myself," "Black Cars," "Wild Horses" -- he found himself spiritually adrift, satisfied with neither money nor fame. So he embarked on a study of what his manager, John Baruck, in the Wall Street Journal, called "the wisdom of the ages."
Vannelli studied religion, philosophy and poetry. He spoke with Zen priests in Japan and Benedictine monks in California and Inca priests in Peru. He explored Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Kant and the Kabbalah. These days Vannelli subscribes to no one school of thought but considers himself ``a Zen theosophist.'' He's simplified his life, too, driving a Honda Accord and living comfortably but modestly in Portland, Ore., with his wife and 9-year-old son.
Vannelli says he always sensed his spiritual exploration would channel itself into music, but he didn't rush it. Twenty years ago, he says, "I had these notions, lofty notions about life and wanting to employ them artistically. But I didn't have the skills I possess now. I suppose I didn't have the wherewithal that 20 years of searching has given me. "But to clearly state what I feel about these topics, when you're talking about Jehovah or Judas or falling in love with reference to the great philosophers, you have to really have a grasp of what you're saying and not just drop names." Vannelli brought them all to "Yonder Tree," but he also arrived with a different sound. The synthesizers are gone; now he sings in front of an acoustic jazz group, displaying a restraint that seemed unimaginable when he first began putting out albums. "It's not terribly unlike some of the records I made in the '70s," he claims. "If you listen to 'Storm at Sunup' or 'Gist of the Gemini' . . . you know such an artist could probably do such a thing."
But, he acknowledges, "Yonder Tree" does represent "a conscious effort to break the mold and not do something as commercial as 'Black Cars' or 'Big Dreamers' or the 'Inconsolable Man' album. It was a conscious effort to do something more progressive, more harmonically challenging -- and stretching out lyrically into thoughts I dare not have spoken about before I was sure of my heart." Vannelli thinks the music will be pouring out of him in the near future; he talks about another new album as soon as late summer. "I have a lot of ideas," he says. "I'm still enamored with harmony and a jazzier sound." And he hasn't abandoned any of the old hits, either. He's simply reworked them: "Living Inside Myself" has a chamberish, "Brahms-like" arrangement; while "Black Cars" sounds "like Coltrane coming together with a funk band." "You know," Vannelli says, "it suddenly dawned on me when I started the tour that the audience might be pissed off by that. But so far they're not at all. They're really enthused with the new arrangements."