Paolo Conte

I treated myself to the Nonesuch edition of The Best of Paolo Conte recently. Go ahead, call me a rank sentimentalist. It won't hurt.

If you get the same notion, be prepared. The packaging is accurate but several tracks are mislabeled on the CD.

But anyway, I bring up Conte to present the piece of useless information.

His show at the Masonic in San Francisco, on a suitably rainy night in 2001, was The Greatest Single Concert I've Ever Attended. Hands down.

I think it had a lot to do with the element of surprise: I was prepared for Conte; his band blew the roof of the dump. And they did it with the studied nonchalance of Roman street cats.

The video above gives a sense of what I experienced that night.