Word: luciano
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Messenger (Island Jamaica), the new album by the Jamaican-born singer Luciano, offers up something refreshingly retro. Musically, Messenger is a big, bouncy, pop album. But its lyrics are focused on the human condition--poverty, spirituality, the preservation of one's heritage. Luciano's voice is another thing that's special: his confident baritone is as warm and deep as Montego...
...from a chance encounter on a Brooklyn side street. The year was 1916, and 14-year-old Meyer Lansky was running errands for his father when he accidentally discovered young Benjamin "Bugsy" Seigel in the process of getting his butt kicked by Salvatore Lucania, soon to become Charles "Lucky" Luciano. After beating Luciano over the head with a monkey wrench until he calmed down, Lansky proceeded to befriend Seigel and eventually found the infamous hit squad Murder Inc., While Luciano built a prostitution (hence the nickname) empire that by 1935 made him the "Boss of Bosses...
Just as conversation stopped in the 1940s when Luciano entered a room and an austere silence of mixed awe and respect descended, it is a cardinal sin to whisper and interrupt the don during The Godfather. As one of Luciano's buddies would recall in a recent A&E docu-drama, "The clink of a glass, the drop of a hat--you'd hear the littlest sound, everyone was so quiet when Lucky arrived at the club." These were high profile men: men who drank their whisky straight, men who traveled in a cloud of cash and Cuban cigars, leaving...
...reality being bad is all fun and games until someone loses an eye--or, in Bugsy's case, a head. After a tiff over Vegas (Bugsy said yes, Lucky said no, and the mafia world was divided forever after over the fate of America's top sleazepost), Luciano had Seigel shot, ending an era of mafia power that only the Corliones could revive. In Puzio's restive family we see all that Lansky and his pals could never capture: the tranquility of a mob network secure in its proficiency, efficiently camouflaging day to day bloodbaths with unequaled Sicilian suavity...
...impressed even this Pavarotti fan. But he faded a bit in the other favorite, "La donna e mobile" (in this translation, "Woman's fidelity") and went slightly hoarse in the lilting, flirtatious duet with Madalena. Nevertheless, he brought a professional polish and pleasing musicality to the role immortalized by Luciano...