The fifth estate is the one after the fourth, and the fourth was the workers. What Arti e Mestieri mean by it is exclusion: the impossibility of finding a place in a society with no values and no rules left except overpowering whoever is beneath you. That is the subject of this record, the music and the words are hard, and it arrived in 1979, by which point Italian progressive rock had stopped being interesting to almost everybody and the golden age was formally over. Four years of silence, an open line-up, and one of the founders playing on a single track on his way out the door.

The short version

Quinto Stato is the third Arti e Mestieri album, released in 1979 on Cramps, four years after Giro di valzer per domani. The line-up is open rather than fixed: Furio Chirico on drums and Marco Gallesi on fretless bass hold it together, with founder Arturo Vitale on winds, piano and backing vocals, plus Claudio Montafia on guitar and flute, Marco Cimino on keyboards, Flavio Boltro on trumpet and Rudi Passuello on lead vocals. Gigi Venegoni appears on one track. Eight pieces, written mostly by Montafia, Cimino, Vitale and Gallesi. It closed the band’s first phase; Acquario followed in 1983.

Quattro anni

The gap was not idle. They played live throughout, including the Parco Lambro festival in Milan in 1976 — the same event Area documented on their first live album — and they conceived a third album called Necropoli that was never made. Then the band contracted. Venegoni left to concentrate on Venegoni & Co., where he made two more records in the jazz-rock style of late Arti e Mestieri; he is on Quinto Stato for exactly one track, which is what a departure sounds like when it is polite. Into the gaps came Cimino, from Errata Corrige, Esagono and Zauber, and Boltro on trumpet. The band that recorded this is not really a band at all but a nucleus with collaborators, and that is audible, for better and for worse.

The sound

A radical change from both Giro di valzer and Tilt. The experimentation is gone and what replaces it is a more traditional jazz-rock, more direct, more immediately legible — the direction the following albums pushed further until the band were simply playing fusion. The lyrics do the work the strangeness used to do: social problems, youth dissatisfaction, and the voice of people who cannot get in. Boltro’s trumpet is new and changes the frontline; Cimino’s keyboards are less symphonic than Crovella’s were; Gallesi’s fretless gives the whole thing a different bottom end. Chirico is still Chirico. The honest summary is the one the Italian critics reached: hard music and hard words, not up to the level of what came before, and convincing anyway.

Reading up on Italian prog? The books go deeper →

The songs

Eight tracks across two sides, and the writing is spread out in a way that tells you how this record was assembled: Montafia has four, Vitale two, Cimino two, Gallesi one. Torino nella mente opens the album, and the title is not decoration — this is a Turin record about Turin, made by a band who had already named a track after the Fiat plant on the previous album. Arterio closes it. Between those two the album works through its subject: what happens to people a city has no use for. There are no long suites and no fusion showpieces of the kind Giro di valzer built its reputation on. The songs are songs, they are short, and the argument is in the words as much as in the playing, which is the whole point of the change.

Reception and legacy

It closed the first phase of the band and it has always lived in the shadow of the two records before it. That is partly fair and partly a matter of timing: nobody in 1979 wanted an Italian jazz-rock album about social exclusion, and the audience that had existed for Tilt had dispersed. Arti e Mestieri went quiet for four more years, came back with Acquario in 1983 — billed on the sleeve as a live album, which it is not; it is a live recording made in a studio — and then Children’s Blues in 1985 on a small label with local distribution. Chirico and Crovella have run the band ever since, through reunions, reissues and new line-ups. Chirico became the first Italian drummer to play the Modern Drummer Festival in America.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and not the one to meet them through. Giro di valzer per domani is the record, and Tilt is the debut everybody cites. Start here with Torino nella mente, which sets out the case. Then Arterio. Then let the rest run, and listen to Boltro and to Gallesi’s fretless, which are the two genuinely new things on it. What you are hearing is a band changing shape under pressure at the exact moment their scene stopped existing, with the founders drifting off one at a time. It is a hard record about hard subjects, and it does not flinch.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →