L'oro di Napoli

1. The classic song

It's rather paradoxical that Naples, the Italian city most often accused of provincialism, holds not only the richest musical heritage of all the local traditions in a musically provincial Italy, but also the most internationally beloved. The immortal “Nel blu dipinto di blu”, which conquered the world in 1958, could only have been written by someone like Modugno, who had fully absorbed the melodic openness of the classic Neapolitan tradition. Even His Majesty Elvis paid tribute to the refined melodies of “Torna a Surriento” and “'O sole mio” with “Surrender” and “It's Now or Never”, proof that songs so structurally distant from the canons of rock'n'roll could still adapt to a style whose revolutionary weapon was an irresistible groove.

Looked at closely, the classic Neapolitan song had itself been revolutionary: from the nineteenth century onward, well before avant-pop, it helped tear down the fences between popular music and art music. Because while it's true that many authors of famous Neapolitan songs had received an academic training, it's equally true that their compositions were addressed essentially to ordinary people, recounting small everyday joys and sorrows, often — though not necessarily — tied to matters of love. This same cultural crossover had also marked the villanelle, songs literally carried “around” the city by wandering musicians. This musical form, built on unaccompanied three-part singing — or, alternatively, on a single voice accompanied by a lute — dealt for the most part with popular themes. The villanelle thus emerged spontaneously, marking the transformation of an oral tradition that, exploiting the ease with which Neapolitan phonetics adapted to melodic construction, moved from storytelling to song. It's not known exactly when the first villanelle appeared. One of the best known, “Il Canto delle lavandaie del Vomero”, is said to date back as far as the Middle Ages. It is a desolate, wondrous lament, an ancestral siren song that enchants and captivates. The effect is even more evocative when paired with images of one of the many enchanted places that make Naples such an esoteric city; the Piscina Mirabilis in Bacoli, for instance, is one such place — not coincidentally chosen by John Turturro in his beautiful documentary-film “Passione” as the evocative setting for the ghostly version of the song performed by Florenza Calogero.

So while it's difficult to pin down exactly when the villanella was born, its evolution over the centuries is much better documented: between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Neapolitan villanella became a lyrical form of composition that fascinated numerous composers, including foreign ones, achieving resounding success across Europe.
The classic Neapolitan song — the one that truly conquered the world, that is — emerged only later, when melodically radiant songs began to spread, shining like the midday sun over the Gulf of Naples, sung with meticulous attention to vocal beauty while still capable of unleashing a passion strong enough to ward off any formal aridity. It was precisely the second half of the nineteenth century that produced these miracles of balance between music and poetry, in which the music was written by composers (among whom it's worth mentioning at least Eduardo di Capua, author of “O' sole mio”) trained at the San Pietro a Majella conservatory, who shunned academic complications; while the poetry was the simple, unadorned verse of central figures of Neapolitan culture such as Libero Bovio and Salvatore Di Giacomo. The former is well known for the stately love elegy “Reginella”, and perhaps less so for “Passione”, which is probably the most precious jewel in the Neapolitan musical crown; the latter, for his part, must have pierced the hearts of thousands of lovers with the touching words of the mournful ballad of troubled love “Catarì”, or with those that drift wistfully over the airy melodic sweep of “Era de maggio”.

Belonging to another generation — intermediate between those of Di Giacomo and Bovio — was Aniello Califano, the poet who in 1915 wrote what would in time become a true anthem of Neapolitan identity: “O' surdato 'nnamurato”, a collective declaration of love that Neapolitans scattered around the world often address to their faraway city. Quite different in tone is “Indifferentemente”, a song written in 1963 by Umberto Martucci and Salvatore Mazzocco, whose bleak despair seems to embody the other face of Naples — not only musically speaking: a profound disillusionment expressed with an intensity equal and opposite to the good-natured nostalgia of “O' surdato 'nnamurato”.
“Indifferentemente” seems to close a delicate period of renewal for the classic Neapolitan tradition — the first fifteen years after the war — both musically and in terms of lyrics and content. The chief architect of this change was Renato Carosone, author of hugely popular songs such as “Caravan Petrol”, “'O sarracino” and “Tu vuò fà l'americano”, in which proverbial Neapolitan irony blends spontaneously with musical structures — especially rhythmic ones — borrowed from jazz, swing and rock'n'roll. Neapolitan song — indeed, Italian song more broadly, considering also the roughly contemporary work of Fred Buscaglione and Domenico Modugno — was discovering America: Carosone was the Christopher Columbus of the stave, his inseparable piano the caravel that landed on new musical shores. In that same period, Neapolitan song also managed to modernise itself along more conventional, and so to speak less traumatic, lines than those that had pushed Carosone to look overseas. It was performers gifted with particular poetic and melodic sensitivity who broke new ground, in a way less austere than in the past but no less effective. Riccardo Pazzaglia, for instance, gave Domenico Modugno the hilarious “Io, mammeta e tu”, turning it into a refined variety-show number that didn't forget the comic tradition of the macchietta; and one cannot fail to mention the eternal Totò, who, setting aside the mask of the mischievous rogue he wore in his films, put on the Hamlet-like mask of the troubled lover unable to forget his beloved/hated “Malafemmena”.

There are probably no periods of decline in art — in any art form; rather, there are periods in which a style or artistic form is no longer able to transform itself, to hybridise with other languages and draw on models of the past to match their spirit: that is what happened to the Neapolitan melodic tradition. Starting from the mid-1970s, the young Nino D'Angelo appeared on the Neapolitan scene, achieving, within a decade, star-level success thanks to unwatchable films and even worse songs. It's not a matter of being unkind, but one can genuinely consider the blond street kid with the face of a good lad the unwitting father of all the neomelodic trash that, like the Camorra and organised crime, has disfigured the image of an entire city. The virus was already spreading: in the 1990s, hordes of teenagers — especially those growing up in the most socially deprived outskirts — would come to idolise not only artistically thin figures (which, after all, would be the lesser evil), but also morally dubious ones, since neomelodic songs, when not indulging in cheap trivialities, celebrate criminal lifestyles. Of course, some tried to resist this sad degradation. Above all, the great Roberto Murolo, who, well into his nineties, kept passing on that melodic-poetic tradition so shamelessly slandered not only by the neomelodici, but also by the likes of Gigi D'Alessio and Sal da Vinci, who are nothing more than a watered-down extension of the neomelodic scene. Nino D'Angelo himself has tried to redeem himself, almost like a Neapolitan Fra Cristoforo who, having realised his own “guilt”, sought refuge in a musical convent built of folk rhythms and ethnic influences. While one can appreciate the effort, the courage to question himself and — why not — in some cases even the results, it's hard to be as forgiving toward him as Manzoni was toward his character.

2. Five poems set to music

Era de maggio (1885; Salvatore Di Giacomo/Mario Pasquale Costa). “Era de maggio” is a song about the indissolubility of love: two lovers part in May, promising to meet again in that same month, when the roses will have bloomed once more. At first, May is conceived as the emblem of an idyllic yet melancholy encounter: the last one with the beloved. The opening verse evokes it through vivid images that let us breathe in the bucolic atmosphere of a Neapolitan spring (“Era de maggio e te cadéano ‘nzino, a schiocche a schiocche, li ccerase rosse. Fresca era ll’aria, e tutto lu ciardino addurava de rose a ciento passe.”). In the second verse, the arid, sorrowful season – autumn and winter – has already passed, and the two lovers find themselves singing their love song once again in front of that fountain whose water, a metaphor for the love they feel for one another, never runs dry, because “passa lu tiempo e lu munno s’avota, ma ‘ammore vero no, nun vota vico”.

Catarì (1892; Salvatore Di Giacomo/Mario Pasquale Costa). Less famous than “Era de maggio”, “Catarì” is also more anguished, though its sadness never tips over into self-pity. Here too the protagonist is a month of the year: this time March, said in a common Neapolitan saying to be the maddest month of all. Indeed, in the mild Neapolitan climate, March, straddling winter and spring, swings between sudden downpours and unexpected clear skies. Using alternating rhyme, Di Giacomo turned this rather accurate commonplace into verse (“Mo nu cielo celeste, mo n’aria cupa e nera, mo d’ ‘o vierno ‘e ‘tempeste, mo n’aria ‘e primmavera”). In this meteorologically uncertain scenario, a shivering bird waits for the sun to come out, while violets sigh on the damp ground. It almost reads like a Symbolist poem, though the metrical form and language never fall into the trap of aestheticism. In the final line the riddle is solved (“Catarì, che vuò cchiù? Ntienneme, core mio, Marzo, tu ‘o ssaje, si’ tu, e st’auciello song’ io”), leaving behind a sense of universal vulnerability: we are all shivering little birds at the mercy of a hostile March.

Passione (1934; Libero Bovio/Ernesto Tagliaferri/Nicola Valente). It's genuinely hard to write anything meaningful about this song. It is so perfect in itself that any attempt to describe or explain it risks tarnishing its magic. No, in the face of “Passione”, in the face of this radiant lament for a lost love, no exegesis will do. And if one existed, it wouldn't be needed. Who hasn't, at least once in their life, felt the pain of abandonment? Who doesn't know that “sweet poison” called melancholy? Who, stone sober, has never felt drunk on grief? And you don't need to be Jesus Christ to feel “the weight of the cross I drag for you”. If Italian song has ever produced anything spiritually close to the blues, its name is “Passione”.

Malafemmena (1951; Antonio De Curtis). There's an archival video in the Rai vaults in which Totò explains how “Malafemmena” came to be. Every self-styled phenomenon on the Italian music scene should be made to learn it by heart: the prince of comedy recalls jotting down the lyrics of “Malafemmena” on a scrap of paper while on the set of a film he was shooting in Formia. Back home that evening, he whistled a few melodies, finding the right one, he says, in an entirely natural way, because “the words themselves carry the music” – as if to say it was the very syllabic rhythm of the verses that generated that magnificent melody. A bittersweet melody, in this case, mirroring the push and pull between love and hate that the song's protagonist directs at his beloved, a cryptic angel-faced woman who uses the apparent sweetness of her features to prey on others' weaknesses (“Si ddoce comme ‘o zucchero però sta faccia d’angelo te serve pe ‘ngannà”). Legend has it the song was dedicated to Silvana Pampanini, but Liliana De Curtis, the daughter Totò had with his wife Diana Bandini Lucchesini Rogliani, later revealed that “Malafemmena” was actually written for her mother, whose relationship with the Neapolitan actor was a deeply troubled one.

Indifferentemente (1963; Umberto Martucci/Salvatore Mazzocco). The helplessness of someone who knows it's all over (“Famme chello che vuó’indifferentemente, tanto ‘o ssaccio che só: pe’ te nun só’ cchiù niente!”); the bitter disillusionment of someone expecting nothing but sorrow (“E damme stu veleno, nun aspettá dimane”); the cruel paradox of someone who, having reached the peak of heartbreak, ends up numb (“Nun sento cchiù dulore e nun tengo cchiù lacreme pe’ te”). All this is “Indifferentemente”; a nihilistic soliloquy, a desperate – in the sense of hopeless – interior monologue by moonlight, when night falls and the song's sorrowful protagonist has nothing left to do but play out the final scene of a film whose ending he already knows (“Tramonta ‘a luna e nuje, pe’ recitá ll’ùrdema scena, restammo mane e mane, senza tené ‘o curaggio ‘e ce guardá”). Wonderful is the jazzed-up version that Mina gave it on her 1996 album “Napoli”.

3. A babel of music: tarantellas, tammurriate and Mediterranean sounds

Alongside the classic Neapolitan song, the musical tradition of Naples boasts a repertoire of popular music and dance that actually belongs to the cultural heritage of all of Southern Italy. The Neapolitan tarantella – also called tammurriata, after the rhythmic accompaniment based on the “tammorra”, a particular kind of tambourine generally larger than the usual ones – is in fact a variant of those dances that, starting in the eighteenth century, spread among the various peoples of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It's no accident that the name “tarantella” derives from the Apulian term “taranta”, generally used in Salento to designate the kind of music better known as “pizzica”. Both terms – taranta and pizzica – refer to the bite (the pinch, “pizzico”) of a spider (the tarantula) capable of inflicting a pain so intense in humans that it drove them to convulsive, frenzied movements. According to popular belief, the tarantula's bite caused hysterical fits that could only be soothed through a musical ritual able to exorcise the movements of the tarantolati by inducing them. That's how the frantic, epileptic steps of these Southern dances came to be commonly labelled “tarantellas”. Clear proof of just how widespread this popular dance is across the region lies in the fact that every corner of the South has its own specific tarantella: from that of the Gargano (named after the promontory in the province of Foggia) to the Sicilian ballettu, by way of the Campanian tammurriata, not to mention the curious “learned” offshoot it found in the first half of the nineteenth century with Gioacchino Rossini, who composed a Neapolitan tarantella for orchestra, tenor and mezzo-soprano – proof of the fascination this rhythmically complex music exerted even in academic circles.
The most famous tammurriata is “Tammurriata nera”, written in 1944 by mandolin player E.A. Mario and journalist Edoardo Nicolardi. It's a frantic, ironic dance with which the two authors sought to exorcise the ordeal of many Neapolitan women who, made pregnant by American marines during the Allied occupation, gave birth to Black children destined to grow up fatherless in a social environment far from free of prejudice. In the version recorded in the 1970s by Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, the song becomes even more frenzied, tacking on at the end a snippet of Al Dexter's “Pistol Packin' Mama”, a song Bing Crosby had ridden to the top of the American charts in late 1943. The lyrics of this variant (“'E signurine 'e Caporichino fanno ammore cu 'e marrucchine, 'e marrucchine se vottano 'e lanze, e 'e signurine cu 'e panze annanze”) likely also carry a denunciation of even more disturbing crimes: the rapes committed by Maghrebi soldiers in the French army against women of Central and Southern Italy, as a “reward” for the decisive role they played in the mission to liberate those territories from fascism.

It was precisely the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare that gave the crucial push to rediscovering the entire cultural heritage of the South – not just folk song, but also theatre, poetry, and religious customs and traditions – which, amid the progressive whirlwind of the postwar years, risked being lost forever. In this respect, the work carried out over Roberto De Simone's long and still-active career has been admirable: more than an actual member, he acted as a kind of guide and organizer for the group. It was he – playwright, composer and ethnomusicologist – who, back in the late 1950s, set in motion the process of revitalizing Campania's popular culture, a process that culminated in 1967 with his meeting with young musicians Carlo d'Angiò, Eugenio Bennato and Giovanni Mauriello, the founders of Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare. Peppe Barra and Fausta Vetere soon joined them, and thanks to a distinctive vocal style – halfway between popular religious hymnody and the boisterous recitatives typical of the Commedia dell'Arte – they helped fuse the vernacular language of native music with the elevated register of opera and theatre, the ultimate goal of the whole NCCP project, as shown by their most ambitious works: “La gatta cenerentola” and the “Cantata dei pastori”. But the merits of the NCCP, and in particular of the archaeo-musicologist De Simone, don't end there: they must be credited with having reworked – not only in the arrangements but also in the metrical structure of the lyrics, and hence in the rhythm – both ancient songs (“Quanno nascette ninno”, the magical Christmas carol composed by Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori in 1754) and less ancient ones (“'E spingule francese”, a classic of Neapolitan song by Salvatore Di Giacomo and Enrico di Leva). Among the many reworkings in their repertoire, the standout is the eighteenth-century tarantella “Lo guarracino”, a kind of underwater “Romeo and Juliet” that tells of a war among fish sparked by a forbidden love between the “guarracino” (a damselfish) and the “sardella” (a sardine). The song's original version lists a multitude of marine species, almost as if wanting to translate into song the evocative still lifes of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan school – those of Recco, Ruoppolo and Paolo Porpora.

Like a skilled cook determined to pass down old rustic flavours to younger generations, Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare taught many how to keep local musical tradition alive without simply standing still to admire it, steering clear of the risk of resting on the laurels of a centuries-old history and the resulting danger of letting it wither away from neglect. It's a lesson that Eugenio Bennato himself took to heart: once his time with the NCCP was over, in 1978 he launched a new project with the telling name Musicanova. The aim now was to enrich the historical repertoire with new folk songs, written specifically to convey Neapolitan cultural values and shed light on the murky chapters of Southern history, starting with the roots of the “Southern Question”: Italian unification. In Musicanova's songs, the controversial figure of the brigand takes on a new dimension, becoming the heroic, desperate symbol of the revolt of a population oppressed first by the Bourbons and then by the new state willed into being by the House of Savoy. And this has nothing to do with the tired narrative clichés of combat-folk that have by now accustomed us to the rehabilitation of any “villain” going: even allowing themselves the occasional rhetorical flourish, Musicanova sought to bring historical truth back to light, to restore the dignity of men – mostly peasants – whom official historiography has relentlessly branded as “bad guys”, but who chose to live as outlaws, reclaiming their land, rather than surrender to the poverty they had been condemned to. The brigands were disillusioned peasants; caught in the grip of the great landowners of the Bourbon Kingdom, they had backed Garibaldi's men on the promise that, once the Italian state was formed, they would go on working that land without any “master” oppressing them any longer. The promise was broken, and, driven to exasperation, many of them took up arms, fled to the mountains and fought against the Italian army. Musicanova's songs, far from any maudlin neo-Bourbon partisanship, told the other side of the story and gave voice to the losers' reasons, following to the letter the controversial practice of counter-history that academia itself has only recently opened up to. The solemn oration of “A la muntagna” bursts into a frenzied dance that goes: “E chi 'e cunosce, 'o ssape bbuono, ca nun l'è mai piaciuto 'o rre Burbone, ma mò nun sape chest'ata storia: ca nun le piace manco 'o rre Savoia. Se n'è fujuto 'o rre Burbone e n'è venuto n'ato cchiù putente: cagna 'o guverno, cagna 'o padrone, sulo pe' ‘anchi stà ‘a sotto nun cagna niente”. It's echoed by the even sharper “Brigante se more”: “nun ce ne fotte d'o re Burbone ma 'a terra è 'a nosta e nun s'adda tuccà”.

The other face of Neapolitan folk belongs to Zezi. If the NCCP and Musicanova represent, in a sense, its learned wing – the former for philological rigour, the latter for historiographical interpretation – Zezi instead gave voice to the working-class reality of their hometown, Pomigliano d'Arco, whose real economy has long been inextricably tied to the ever-troubled fortunes of the FIAT car plant, sadly still relevant today. Since 1974, Zezi have proclaimed themselves a “workers' band”, offering a repertoire built mainly around traditional tammurriate alongside original songs, mostly dedicated to unemployment, layoffs and the exploitation of labour under ruthless capitalist logic. Their weapon of choice is biting irony, which suits their name perfectly – the Zeza being Pulcinella's fearsome wife – but sadly a lapse into bad taste is always lurking whenever protest sloganeering is put ahead of the poetry that the Pomigliano group has nonetheless managed to express on more than one occasion. Perhaps the true spirit of Zezi lies in the anti-establishment gripes of “Capipallisti”, “Tammurriata dell'Alfa Sud” and “Pose e sorde”, and it's entirely fitting that a band calling itself “working-class” should take pride in songs probably written to be chanted in the streets during Communist Party festivals, rallies and strikes. The point, though, is that Zezi also managed to write songs in which attention to the problems of their region doesn't come at the expense of the music's poetic quality – if anything, it enhances it. That's the case with “Sant'Anastasia ('A Flobert)”, a harrowing procession for guitar and flute that flares into rage in its finale, turning into a furious tarantella determined to avenge, with blows of the tammorra, the deaths of twelve workers at the Flobert explosives factory, which blew up in 1975 in the town that gives the song its title. Then there's “Vesuvio”, their best-known song and perhaps their finest: a tribal rite in honour of Vesuvius, a devout prayer that the King Volcano – who holds in his hands the fate of the towns risen at his feet – might quell his own wrath, because “Si jesce pazz, è pazz overamente; l'unica verità pe' tutt' quante sarà chell' 'e fuì”. Should an eruption come, flight is the only option; the drums mimic it with a syncopated pulse, while the overwhelming descent of the lava is captured in the torrential elegy dripping from the fife. Zezi rarely venture into world excursions, but when they do, as in “Pummarola Black”, they become bards of Mediterranean-ness, with Arabic influences linking Naples, North Africa and Turkey in a single glance. One vast, single land.

The Mediterranean: this is the third mask of Neapolitan folk. Wearing it, one of the most forward-thinking Italian musicians: Enzo Avitabile. A son of Naples's rough outskirts, a man of great culture who prefers speaking the language of the street rather than hiding behind arid dialectical sophistry, Avitabile began his career under the banner of soul-funk. Armed with his saxophone, he achieved remarkable milestones, playing alongside institutions like James Brown, Tina Turner and the funk saxophonist par excellence, Maceo Parker. Then, starting in the 1990s, he embarked on a kind of cultural journey, seeking not so much what sets one musical tradition apart from another as the common threads that let us rediscover ourselves as brothers, all children of the same planet. Avitabile's music is ecumenical: it builds imaginary bridges between Naples and the Global South, joining lands geographically apart but spiritually akin, showing that there isn't really so much difference, in the play of vocal modulation, between the singing of a Neapolitan and that of an Arab muezzin or a Nigerian griot. The saxophonist from Marianella has had concrete, not merely cultural, aims too, leading him to collaborate with many world-music stars in order to fund humanitarian projects. One of the most successful was the 1999 single “Mane e mane” – an anthem of brotherhood sung as a duet with Guinean kora player Mory Kanté – whose proceeds went to UNICEF.
In the new millennium, Avitabile's multicultural mosaic has grown richer still, starting with the wonderful “Salvamm'O munno”, a world-music record that reveals the African heart beating within the Campanian hinterland. In the town of Portico di Caserta, during the feast of St. Anthony the Abbot on January 17th, a Christian religious ritual is re-enacted every year, though it actually has pagan origins. According to ancestral tradition, in olden times the peasants of Caserta, in order to drive away evil spirits and hope for an abundant harvest, would ceaselessly beat their tools (barrels, scythes, vats) to different rhythms. This produced a range of tempos: from the driving pulse of the tarantella to the trance-like pastellassa to the austere march of the dead. Fascinated by this form of popular ritual, Avitabile invited the Bottari group (the barrel-drumming ensemble still active in Portico) to collaborate on the record, weaving a hybrid tapestry of harmonies and melodies around their obsessive rhythms.
Delving into Mediterranean musical traditions has, over time, become a genuine priority for the Neapolitan saxophonist, to the point that in 2009 he established, at Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory, Italy's first world-music professorship. And yet it remains baffling how little attention the Italian music press has paid to this important musician, especially considering that in England his “Salvamm'O Munno” received four BBC Music Award nominations, while in America his music can count admirers of the calibre of Jonathan Demme – who recently made a documentary about his life – and David Crosby, a guest on his latest work, “Black Tarantella”. Evidently Avitabile is too little of an indie figure: better to sing the praises of recyclers of Anglo-American clichés who pose as saviours of the Italian underground, or indeed of Italian music as a whole. Perhaps, though, Enzo Avitabile's great lesson lies precisely in having understood that the only way for Italy to feel part of the world musically is to proudly display its own singular identity, showing without shame just how deep its roots go.

4. Neapolisound: the sound of Naples in five records

Roberto De Simone and NCCP – La gatta Cenerentola (1976, EMI). “La gatta Cenerentola” is the title of a Neapolitan fairy tale by Giambattista Basile, included in the collection – published in 1636 and translated into Italian only at the end of the nineteenth century by Benedetto Croce – known as “Lo cunto de li cunti”, otherwise known as “Pentamerone” for its narrative structure, which unfolds fifty tales over five days. It's a book that had a decisive influence on the work of some of Europe's greatest fairy-tale writers. Indeed, it was by reworking some of Basile's tales that Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm later wrote the definitive versions of universally known fairy tales, Cinderella among them. Basile's Cinderella, however, is quite different from the one that has entered the collective imagination and was made famous in 1950 by the Disney film of the same name. She's called Zezolla, and is the daughter of a prince who, deceived by her fraudulent sewing teacher, kills her coarse stepmother and then persuades her father to marry that very same revered teacher. Once the wedding is celebrated, however, the teacher moves her six daughters into the prince's palace, relegating Zezolla to a corner of the court, among the cats by the fireplace. Only thanks to the spells of the fairy dove will Zezolla manage to redeem her lowly position and even go on to marry the king.
Starting from this narrative core – and making some changes to it, including the addition of new characters such as the little monk and the washerwomen – in 1976 Roberto De Simone, backed by Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, turned “La gatta Cenerentola” into a folk melodrama that, over time, has become a true classic of Italian popular theatre. The music was released on a successful self-titled album that stands as the crown jewel of the Neapolitan group's discography. The eighteen tracks are welded into the classic structure of Opera: there are arias (“Jesce sole”), duets (“Duetto”), choruses (those of the soldiers and the washerwomen) and recitatives (the hilarious litany of “Rosario” and the rhyming, assonant torrent of insults in “Scena delle ingiurie”), but they're performed in a carnivalesque style, close both to operatic singing and to the masked performances of the Commedia dell'Arte. The “high” dimension is evoked by the classical instrumentation (strings, brass, harpsichords); the “low” one is instead conjured by the language of the lyrics: a colloquial language – the Neapolitan spoken by ordinary people – ennobled by the intricate metrical schemes in which the verses are arranged.
The bond with popular musical forms is further ensured by the songs (“Canzone delle sei sorelle”, “Canzone del monacello”), the villanelle (“Villanella di cenerentola”) and the dances of native (“Tarantella”) or Arabic (“Moresca”) origin. In short, “La gatta Cenerentola”, magnificently merging the two traditions that have made Italian music famous around the world – national opera and Neapolitan song, both at once genuinely learned and genuinely popular – restored enchantment, magic and dream to a musical period in Italy dominated by the socio-political neorealism of “committed” singer-songwriters. In four words: a historically necessary record.

Musicanova – Brigante se more (1980; Philips). In 1976 Eugenio Bennato and Carlo d'Angiò left Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare to found a new band, Musicanova. For their debut album, “Garofano d'ammore”, they were joined by musicians of the calibre of Toni Esposito on percussion, Robert Fix on flute and Teresa De Sio on vocals and guitar. With bassist Gigi De Rienzo also on board, in 1978 Musicanova put together their first masterpiece, simply titled “Musicanova”, which contains, besides the already-mentioned “A la muntagna” – undoubtedly their most moving track – the irresistible “Pizzica minore” and the surprising blues of “Siente mo' che t'aggia dì”.
Even so, one is slightly more drawn to “Brigante se more”, an album with greater internal cohesion that in some respects set a precedent. It's the soundtrack to “L'eredità della priora”, a RAI TV drama produced in 1980 that tells the story of three soldiers of the Bourbon army who, following the conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by the Piedmontese army, join the Lucanian rebels led by the brigand Carmine Crocco. Precisely because of its function as film score, the album consists largely of instrumental pieces, at times fairy-tale-like (“Tema di Isabellina”, “Tema per flauto dolce”), endowed with an evocative power capable of recreating the rugged, alluring atmosphere of the southern mountain landscapes, as when the accordion of “Il cammino del brigante” or the flute of “A la terra di Basilicata” seem to wind their way through the paths and ravines of the Lucanian Apennines.
Director Anton Giulio Majano, however, also needed striking theme songs for the opening and closing credits of the drama, songs that could embody the spirit of those who had lived through history, even if only as its victims, even in defeat. Thus came the galloping piece for double bass, violin and tammorra “Vulesse addeventare nu brigante”, and above all the battle song “Brigante se more”: a simple guitar piece that sends chills down the spine, sung with the pride of a national anthem. A piece so deeply felt that legends soon sprang up about its origins, including the claim that it was a genuine nineteenth-century anthem written by the Bourbon rebels themselves. In reality, this was a hoax evidently spread by some Bourbon nostalgic, since the supposed original version of “Brigante se more” differs from Musicanova's only in two lines, including one that reads “nuje cumbattimmo p' 'o rre burbone”, which completely flips the meaning of the whole song: from an anthem of the fight for freedom to an anthem in defence of monarchical power.

Peppe Barra – Guerra. (2001, Temposhare). June 29, 1978. Rai Due airs the special “Serata d'onore”, dedicated to Eduardo De Filippo. On screen, alongside the great Neapolitan playwright, are, among others, Vittorio Gassman – the show's host –, Marcello Mastroianni, Carla Fracci and Nino Rota. This snapshot alone is enough to convey the artistic stature of Peppe Barra, who that evening was also called upon to honour the revered maestro.
There's no getting around it: you don't end up among such sacred monsters by chance. It's no surprise, then, that on his 1993 solo debut, “Mo vene”, Barra hosted a free jazz institution like the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, nor that two years later Fabrizio De André asked him for a Neapolitan version of “Bocca di Rosa”, made in collaboration with Vincenzo Salemme. That was 1995, six years before the Neapolitan singer paid tribute once again to the great Genoese songwriter with a grand-guignol version of “Don Raffaé” – with Barra as a grim Pulcinella hamming it up over a village-band fanfare – included on his second album, “Guerra”.
It's a record punctuated by the indispensable violin of Lino Cannavacciuolo and by top-notch production, drawing on the endless possibilities of the recording studio to wrap essentially ethnic sounds in that technological sheen that is the hallmark of European world music (Peter Gabriel is the textbook example). Thus, in the shadowy, distinctly trip-hop pulse of the title track, Naples reveals itself as a Mediterranean Bristol, reminding Robert “3D” Del Naja of his own Campanian roots, while “Suonno” unfurls an unsettling concerto for strings and an expressionist recitative worthy of Scott Walker's “Tilt”. The opening of “Oi mare ma” looks to the Mexico of mariachi orchestras, just as the majestic finale of “Escagliento” leads straight to Burkina Faso, where the voice of singer Gabin Dabiré intertwines with that of French soprano Marie Stephane Bernard.
In between lies the combative Naples of the late eighteenth century, torn between the Neapolitan Republic, founded by the troops of revolutionary France in 1799, and the Bourbon kingdom of King Ferdinand IV, in the “Canto dei Sanfedisti”. Surprisingly, the common people sided in defence of the Crown and the Catholic religion (the term “Sanfedismo” comes from the phrase “Santa Fede”, Holy Faith) because of the unbearable tax burden imposed by the French. For this reason the song quotes the Carmagnole (the revolutionaries' song) but twists its meaning, cheering instead for the king and the death of the Jacobins. From a philological standpoint this is an extremely important revival, one that appears controversial when viewed from a historical perspective, since the Bourbon repression was extremely brutal (the “onn'Eleonara” of the lyrics is Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca, a noblewoman of Portuguese descent sent to the scaffold for her republican beliefs). Quibbles aside, musically it remains the most powerful moment on an album full of wonders.

Massimo Ranieri – Oggi o dimane (2001; Sony). Massimo Ranieri's long and successful career should be thrown in the face of those who claim that mainstream, populist music is a priori synonymous with bad taste and poor artistic quality. A singer, actor and television showman, the man registered at the Naples municipal office as Giovanni Calone has shown over the years a rare ability to shape his art and make it accessible to everyone, from children to the elderly, from learned professors to humble farmers, without ever giving in to the temptation of glibness or, worse, vulgarity. And let's be honest — it's easy for those in Italy's pompous but nowadays flimsy independent music scene, accustomed to handing out quality labels to artists in direct proportion to the number of empty references in their lyrics, to sneer at a man who even had the nerve to win Sanremo (in 1988, no less, with one of the most beautiful and famous songs ever written: "Perdere l'amore").
God of music, forgive them, for they know not what they're missing! What they're missing, first and foremost, is this splendid "Oggi o dimane", the first instalment of a trilogy of reinterpretations of traditional Neapolitan songs rearranged in an ethno-world key by the maestro Mauro Pagani. A name that immediately brings to mind the magnificent "Creuza De Ma" by De André, and indeed Naples, like Genoa, is a window looking out onto the Mediterranean. So the sixteen songs of "Oggi o dimane" are dressed in new harmonies (poetic interlacings of strings unify different idioms: the bouzouki from Greece, the Arabic-derived lute, the kora from North Africa) and new rhythms (the udu, an African wind instrument used as percussion, and the zarb, a type of Iranian drum).
For his part, Ranieri never overdoes it, interpreting with passion and balance songs instrumentally renewed thanks to the skill of extraordinary musicians such as Ellade Bandini (drums), Ares Tavolazzi (bass) and Paolo Jannacci (accordion). And so "'E spingule francese" becomes a joyous tribal chant, "Caravan Petrol" and "O' Guarracino" turn into Bedouin rides across the Sahara desert, while "Scalinatella" shines with the siren-like melismas of Tunisian singer Mouni Amari. There's also room for typically Western touches, such as the string arrangement that transforms "O' surdato nnammurato" into an ethereal madrigal. Whether it's the sea or the sun, only those who have walked its streets know that there's an indescribable something in the Neapolitan air. The same something you breathe in among the notes of "Oggi o dimane".

Enzo Avitabile & Bottari – Salvamm'o munno (2004, Musichemigranti). The musicians who played Woodstock in 1969 had a utopian dream: to change the world through music. They didn't succeed. Then again, they never could have, because it's already a miracle that music can shift a mood, touch the soul, purify the spirit. You can't burden an art form with such an enormous responsibility, one that should instead rest on the shoulders of civil society and political institutions. It's a lovely thought that Enzo Avitabile chose to title his masterpiece "Salvamm'o munno" ("Let's save the world"), rather than the more banal "Cagnamm'o munno" ("Let's change the world"), precisely because he understood that music can't change the world, but paradoxically can do something greater: save a life. Just one, as much as all of them, because, as the unforgettable poster for "Schindler's List" reminded us, "whoever saves one life saves the world."
Mind you, though: this isn't a physical salvation, but a spiritual and moral one, something very close to the Christian concept of redemption. Music often aims at the soul, and in this sense "Salvammo'o munno" is a soul record. The soul of the global south. From the rural percussion of the Bottari di Portico di Caserta to the saxophone of Cameroonian Manu Dibango, from the singing of Algerian Khaled to the a fronn' 'e limone singing (a type of extended, unaccompanied vocal style) of Zi Giannino del Sorbo, from Sardinian winds (Luigi Lai's launeddas) to Balkan ones (Bachir Mizmar's zurna), from African strings (Baba Sissoko's ngoni) to Middle Eastern ones (Simon Shaheen's oud). A musical polyglossia joined, naturally, by Avitabile's saxophone, with its warm, passionate tone, straight out of the finest black music tradition.
The path to salvation unfolds through the heartrending prayer for Scampia "A' peste", the poem in defence of childhood "Tutt'egual song 'e creature", the hopeful chant "Canta Palestina", but above all through universal dances to be danced alongside distant and different brothers ("Abball' cu me"), recognising a bit of oneself in the other ("Paisà"). A recognition that leads to outrage at the abuses ("Port allere") and exploitation ("Chest'è l'Africa") suffered by peoples who all belong to one single race: ours. The human one. "Simme tuttuno", Avitabile sings alongside Manu Dibango as the percussion catches fire with love. The track, which gives the album its title, is a revelation: rhythm will save the world.

5. Neapolitan Power: metropolitan blues and Neapolitan fusion.

Halfway through this journey, it becomes clear that Neapolitan musical identity should primarily be traced back to the ethno-folk repertoire, which encompasses both the reworkings of classic songs and popular tammurriate, and the Mediterranean and world fusions of Peppe Barra and Enzo Avitabile. This is a visceral identity that, by enriching itself with elements outside the native tradition, has managed to renew itself precisely by giving up part of its own Neapolitan-ness, discovering itself to be a small part of a broader Mediterranean culture. Well, this is just one of the many musical stories Naples has had the privilege of telling. A new one began in the 1970s, when a generation of young musicians injected an explosive shot of international sounds — mainly American ones (blues, jazz, funk and the emerging fusion) — under the skin of the local sound. It was the birth of a genuine movement that went down in history as Neapolitan Power, a label that clearly echoed the African-American slogan Black Power. Black power, Neapolitan power. After all, the guru of this musical movement was James Senese: black-skinned, American by origin (his father was a U.S. Army officer), Neapolitan by birth (his real name is Gaetano).

Once the intense run with Showmen came to an end, Senese became the leader of the most important Italian jazz-funk group: Napoli Centrale. His was the voice, but above all his was the saxophone, which drew from the late John Coltrane the expressive possibilities of improvisation, and from electric Miles Davis the ability to cross-contaminate styles across genres. Their self-titled 1975 debut album — which projected the grooves of Sly & The Family Stone, Funkadelic and Stevie Wonder into the alleyways of Naples — remains a cornerstone of Italian rock. On this first album, the rhythm section was entrusted to two technical monsters, Franco del Prete (drums) and Tony Walmsley (bass), while Mark Harris — an unusual case of an American émigré in Naples — handled the keyboard parts. Starting with the piano, an instrument whose jazz colourings underpin the essential "Campagna", a song emblematic of the transmigration of popular song themes — in this case, the frustration and desire for revenge felt by farm labourers towards landowners — into the rhythmic dynamics of fusion. Performance freedom was the guiding star of the quartet, who fearlessly ventured into full-blown stellar jams ("'A gente 'e Bucciano"), alienating progressive reveries ("Viecchie, mugliere, muorte e criaturi") and driving instrumentals ("Vico Primo Parise n.8"). Lyrically, the resulting portrait is often bleak: the lyrics, written by Franco Del Prete, tell of the depopulation of the countryside and the abandonment of the hard but healthy life of a farmer in favour of the alienating lifestyle dished out by industrialised society.
The same winning formula was repeated the following year on "Mattanza" with a heavily reshuffled line-up, featuring Pippo Guarnera in place of Mark Harris and Kevin Bullen as the new bassist. If one had to pinpoint a difference from the debut, it would be the presence of more cerebral tracks ("Sotto a suttana", "Sotto e n'coppa"), even though the rhythmic drive remains a trademark of the band on the epileptic "Simme iute e simme venute" and the astonishing "Sangue misto". What's most disarming, though, is the barely two-minute "O nonno mio" — a heartfelt, mutant blues in honour of folk wisdom — and the lyrical swaying of "Forse sto capenno", caught between the piano's gentle breaths and the sax's croaking.

The historic phase of Napoli Centrale came to a close in 1977 with "Qualcosa ca nu'mmore", after which there was a long hiatus (the band would only reform in 1992), during which Senese was able to focus on his solo career and take part in important projects with other colleagues, starting with the ace trio of albums from young Pino Daniele's discography: the self-titled debut from 1977, "Nero a metà" from 1980, and the masterpiece of the by-then-consolidated Neapolitan sound, "Vai mò" (1981). Albums that preceded the whole movement's sparkling final flourish, that "Bella'mbriana" which, in its overwhelming funky drive ("Tutta 'nata storia", "Bella 'mbriana", "Mo' basta", "Ma che mania"), boasted the participation of Wayne Shorter, the historic saxophonist of Miles Davis and leader of Weather Report, and bassist Alphonso Johnson, who also passed through the Weather Report of the celebrated "Black Market".
But let's take things in order, because while it's undeniable that over the last two decades Pino Daniele's inspiration has gradually faded away until it melted "like snow in the sun" — to shamelessly quote one of his own most slapdash songs — it must also be acknowledged that the first phase of his career fully justifies all the popularity the Neapolitan bassist and guitarist has gradually earned over time. Italy probably didn't deserve the early Pino Daniele. It didn't deserve him, a national music scene that, with few exceptions, has often proved capable only of aping foreign music (Vasco, are your ears burning?) or shutting itself away in the conservatism of an overly self-referential brand of pop music. Pino Daniele, instead, was the man of dialectics between two traditions, his music a synthesis of Neapolitan folk (in the harmonies, the melodies, the bitter irony of many of his lyrics) and blues (in the rhythmic structure and instrumental technique). "Tarumbò" — a sort of blend of the words "tarantella" and "blues", also the title of one of his 1982 songs — was the definition Daniele himself gave of his own music. Wonderful examples of this musical fusion can already be found on the remarkable 1977 debut "Terra mia": the cheerful "Na tazzulella e'café", the picaresque "Ce sta chi ce penza", the light-hearted "Maronna mia" and "Che calore". But when the mood grows more hushed and pained, the mandolins rise to the fore in the enchanting sonnet "Napul'è", and the melodic tradition resurfaces in the melancholy lament of "Terra mia".
The stylistic recipe of "Terra mia" was thoroughly original, but it still needed further tweaks and refinements — reagents, so to speak, to complete the new potion. That's where the second self-titled album, released in 1979, came in. A brilliant transitional record which, through the idyll of "Chi tene o mare", the ragtag-army blues of "Je so pazzo", the cheerful Cuban dance of "Chillo è nu buono guaglione" and the progressive funk of "Il mare", paved the way for the album on which the new Mediterranean blues would crystallise: "Nero a metà". The title is dedicated to Showmen singer Mario Musella — who died in October 1979 — whom Daniele affectionately called "Nero a metà" ("Half black") because he was half Neapolitan and half African-American. Listening to the album's twelve tracks, however, one gets the feeling that Pino Daniele himself was, at the time, a "half black" man too. The ease with which, across the album's twelve songs, Neapolitan phonetics slot into the rhythmic-harmonic structures of blues is nothing short of miraculous. And they can only be described as miracles: the linguistic-musical crossover of "I say i' sto'ccà", the dazzling boogie of "Musica Musica", the scratchy hard-blues of "Puozze passà nu guaio" and the sun-drenched funk of "A me me paice 'o blues". A special mention, though, goes to that masterpiece of infinite tenderness that goes by the name of "Quanno chiove".

Taking a broader view, "Nero a metà" is unquestionably Pino Daniele's best album as well as one of the most important in the history of Italian music. However, if we narrow the scope to the Neapolitan Power phenomenon alone, it's the following album, "Vai mò", that holds the title of essential record: thirty-three minutes of explosive grooves ("Che te ne fotte", "Ma che ho"), elegantly percussive blues ("Yes I Know My Way"), jazzy atmospheres, sometimes smoky ("Notte che se ne va", "Un giorno che non va") and sometimes laid-back ("Viento 'e terra", "Puorteme a casa mia"). In terms of arrangements, "Vai mò" is Pino Daniele's richest and most refined record, for which he assembled a genuine Neapolitan supergroup featuring Rino Zurzolo on bass, James Senese on sax, Joe Amoruso on keyboards, Tullio De Piscopo on drums, Fabio Forte on trombone and Toni Esposito on percussion.
By that point, Esposito had already released at least two absolute masterpieces — the first two records of his career — that grafted Mediterranean rhythms onto free-form compositions close to the contemporary jazz-prog experiments of musicians from the Canterbury school. His 1974 debut "Rosso Napoletano" pivots on the eighteen esoteric minutes of the title track, a genuine two-part suite that ventures into a forest of exotic percussion populated by zoomorphic sounds (Robert Fix's sax and the electric piano of the great musician and arranger Paul Buckmaster). In some ways, the Neapolitan percussionist's work on the timbral variety of drums ("Danza dei bottoni") and on the blend of jazz, minimalism and tribal sounds ("Il venditore di elastici") can be seen as an embryonic form of Jon Hassell's fourth world music. Also shared with the great American saxophonist's fourth-world music is the search for ambient "descriptive" effects, best appreciated in the eight compositions of "Processione sul mare" (1976). In Toni Esposito's case, though, the environment depicted isn't that of imaginary jungles but the Neapolitan urban landscape, its tumultuous, bewitching life. You seem to be walking among the stalls of Resina or La Maddalena amid the street clamour of "Mercato di stracci", slipping into impenetrable alleyways teeming with the voices of street vendors ("L'alba nei quartieri"), gazing at the sea swallowing the rocks while the moon looks down on the city from above ("Processione sul mare").

An extraordinary percussionist whom Franco Battiato simply called "the drum man", Toni Esposito, besides creating a new sound for all kinds of percussion — from congas to marimba — collaborated with musicians of the calibre of Brian Auger and Don Cherry, invented hybrid instruments like the tamborder, and even achieved well-deserved success with an irresistibly danceable track like 1984's "Kalimba de luna", with which he won "Un disco per l'estate". Of course, by that point the formula was no longer the uncompromising one of his early albums that flirted with jazz and prog. So, to find the real trait d'union between the jazz-funk blend of Neapolitan Power and the strand of progressive less enthralled by fantasy imagery, we need to look elsewhere. Specifically, at the second incarnation of Osanna, in the year of our Lord 1978. That year the band reformed after splitting up in 1975. Of the original line-up, singer Lino Vairetti, guitarist Danilo Rustici and drummer Massimo Guarino remained, joined by keyboardist Fabrizio d'Angelo and bassist Enzo Petrone. The fruit of this new artistic life was the little gem "Suddance", an album that moved away from the epic drift of Italian prog — a specialty Osanna themselves had excelled at during the first part of their career — to embrace the expansive sounds of jazz, the rhythmic drive of funk and a Neapolitan vocal style tinged with soul and blues nuances, as in the opening "Ce vulesse". It wasn't a radical revolution, though, because Osanna still remained an essentially progressive group — only now they welcomed the precious fusion suggestions of James Senese and Pino Daniele ("O napulitano", "Suddance") and let themselves be more clearly influenced by folk dances (Jethro Tull transplanted to Vomero on "A zingara").

6. Palepoli vs Neapolis: progressive Naples

A brief digression is needed here. Even if not everyone is aware of it, Italy in the 1970s was one of the most prolific and receptive nations towards progressive music. The genre's leading Italian bands (PFM, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Le Orme, Area) rose to international prominence; others achieved a cult status not only among Italian fans but also abroad, so much so that today, browsing foreign blogs and websites, it's not unusual to come across mentions of Picchio dal Pozzo, Opus Avantra or Perigeo. Here too, Naples's proverbial creativity didn't just sit back and watch — or rather, listen — offering a poker hand of essential titles to the cause of Italian prog.
We can start again from Osanna and their first line-up — the one featuring Elio D'Anna on flute and sax — which in 1975 produced "Palepoli", perhaps not a masterpiece but certainly a great album, made up of two torrential tracks — "Oro caldo" and "Animale senza respiro" — which, through their shifts in tempo and register, end up devouring everything in sight: from tammurriate to Anglo-Saxon folk, from twilit High Tide-style hard outbursts to passages bordering on free-jazz. Separating them is only the musical haiku of "Stanza Città". The title "Palepoli" (from the Greek "Palaios" and "Polis", ancient city) sprang from a precise intent: to evoke the atmospheres of an arcane past, lost in memory, through a modern musical language — that of rock broadly speaking — imbued with the ritual power, instinctual charge and ancestral spirituality of ancient civilisations. Similar conceptual premises also underpinned the identically titled theatrical show that involved, besides the band itself, masked actors and dancers.

Among Osanna's ranks, for a brief period, was also Gianni Leone, the eclectic keyboardist struck by lightning in the form of Keith Emerson, who, recruited by Vito Manzari (bass), Gianchi Stringa (drums) and Lino Ajello (guitar), helped transform Balletto di Bronzo from an aspiring hard-rock band into one of the most fascinating entities in Italian prog. The group, born in the full swing of the beat explosion under the menacing moniker Battitori Selvaggi, took their new name from a painting by Edward Wadsworth, an exponent of English Vorticism, an artistic movement that, following in the footsteps of Italian Futurism, sought to translate the electro-mechanical dynamism of modern life into jagged pictorial forms. It's no coincidence that their masterpiece "Ys" from 1972 is a concept album that reworks, in a modernist, science-fiction key, the French legend of the city of Ys, a sort of Breton Atlantis that — as the legend has it — was swallowed by the sea following the fateful love affair between King Gradlon's daughter and a mysterious young stranger of demonic identity. In reality, beyond the literary flourishes, the story told across the album's five tracks centres on thoroughly twentieth-century themes such as incommunicability and human loneliness. The protagonist is the last man on Earth, to whom a demiurgic voice has revealed the universal truth, which the survivor nevertheless cannot pass on to anyone else of his kind, given the near-total extinction of the human race. This is both his punishment and his salvation: after so much wandering through desert lands, all he can do is recognise himself in "another man with those arms outstretched on a cross."
In terms of content, "Ys" is a jumble of mythology, Christianity and modernism; in terms of form, it offers a finely balanced blend of the symphonic rock of Genesis and the apocalyptic progressions of Van Der Graaf Generator. A sinister atmosphere emanates from the frantic interplay between the cerebral rhythms of the Stinga-Manzari duo, Ajello's stinging guitars and Leone's ineffable keyboards. The latter deploys a vast repertoire of styles and techniques: from solemn organ requiems to refined jazz pianism, from noble harpsichord virtuosity to magnetic bursts of moog.
Charged with philosophical tension and religious anxiety, poised between existentialism and spirituality, "Ys" is a record that, from whatever angle you look at it, holds its own against many international classics of the genre.

What has just been said applies even more to one of the most stylistically original, technically accomplished and emotionally moving Italian albums ever made: "Aria" (1972) by Alan Sorrenti. If Balletto di Bronzo was interested in science fiction, Alan Sorrenti was interested in magic; if Balletto di Bronzo told legends, Alan Sorrenti told fairy tales; if Balletto di Bronzo drew on intellectual progressive, Alan Sorrenti drew on the most sublime singer-songwriter tradition, that of Fred Neil and Tim Buckley. In 1977 he would become known to everyone as the "Figlio delle stelle" ("Son of the stars"), but in fact, until shortly before, Alan Sorrenti had been a starsailor, someone who spoke of carnal love as if it were platonic love ("I entered your body. I am the universe. I am your body") and of imagined encounters as if they were melancholy farewells ("I'd like to know you, but I don't know what to call you. I'd like to follow you, but the crowd swallows you up. I was waiting for you when it was raining outside and my room was full of silence for you"). These are words drawn from the album's two gems: "Aria" and "Vorrei Incontrarti". The nearly twenty minutes of the title track — a poetic meeting between heaven and hell — take shape amid fairy-tale acoustic guitar arpeggios, ancestral sounds (Jean-Luc Ponty's violin) and startling rhythmic mutations. The true epiphany is Sorrenti's voice, an ethereal drifting of phonemes, an ecstatic stretching of vowels and syllables that, at the end of each line, bursts into terrifying declamatory spasms. The dreamy melancholy of the moving "Vorrei incontrarti" marks the record's other peak: a wandering folk song through the valleys of imagination and memory, shaped by the evocative harmonic interplay between Sorrenti's acoustic guitar and Vittorio Nazzaro's classical guitar. The remaining two tracks ("La mia mente" and "Un fiume tranquillo") are no less impressive, marked — especially the latter — by jazz-like rarefaction.
The following "Come un vecchio incensiere all'alba di un villaggio deserto" only partially recaptures the magic of the debut: in the delicate flow of "Serenesse" (which features David Jackson's flute), in the whispered blues of "A te che dormi" and in the cryptic incantation of "Angelo".

Among the collaborators on Alan Sorrenti's early work, one name stands out: Luciano Cilio, a sensitive multi-instrumentalist of tragic temperament who took his own life in 1983, at the age of thirty-three. But don't picture some kind of Neapolitan underground rock star. Cilio was in fact a rigorous experimenter who nevertheless placed lyrical expression above sound exploration for its own sake, because he had understood that the time had come for the avant-garde to break free of its autistic isolation, moving beyond John Cage's meta-music and speaking once more to ordinary people. Of course, Cilio's starting points are still to be found in the learned currents of twentieth-century music, particularly in Schönberg's atonal music and Philip Glass's Zen minimalism, but his compositions bear a much closer resemblance to those of certain boundary-pushing bands of the Sixties and Seventies: they possess the spiritual breath of Popol Vuh, the esoteric quality of Sergius Golowin, and the philosophical bent of the Third Ear Band. Indeed, the academic world regarded the work of the self-taught Cilio much as it would the work of a freak. In light of all this, the only album the Neapolitan musician managed to release, the beautiful "Dialoghi del presente" from 1977, can only be linked to progressive insofar as it is a product of that particular cultural climate, given that, all things considered, we're talking about a record of pure avant-garde music. Pure both because it makes no compromises (not even with academic music, let alone rock!) and because it transcends the human dimension, and therefore its corruptibility, its impiety. And it does so in barely half an hour.
Half an hour in which the transient is transfigured into the eternal, in which, as Jim O'Rourke wrote, "it's possible to grasp that moment suspended in time." The eternal is already there, in the celestial adagio for guitar, piano, cello and female choir of "Primo quadro della conoscenza", but it dissipates in the thoroughly earthly sonic concretions of flute and strings ("Secondo quadro della conoscenza") and in the shamanic rites that urge the invisible, from reality, to reveal itself ("Quarto quadro della conoscenza"). But there's no way around it: we remain trapped in the greyness of matter. Time flows on again. Relentless. Silent. What stops it, once and for all, are the ecstatic piano nocturne of "Terzo quadro della conoscenza" and an "Interludio" in which the otherworldly harmonies of mandolin and cello lead an ethereal fingerpicking à la John Fahey beyond the thresholds of the absolute. It's a crime that such wonderful music is destined to remain a treasure for the few; a treasure that, moreover, remained buried for a long time, until the admirable label Die Schachtel republished these five recordings alongside other unreleased material in the box set curated by Girolamo De Simone, "Dell'universo assente".

With Luciano Cilio, the genre boundaries of progressive have already been stretched. With the inclusion in this survey of Contropotere — an anarcho-punk band only half-Neapolitan (the other half was from Padua), but based in the Campanian capital all the same — purists will be positively horrified. It was the second half of the Eighties, the prog season was well behind us, and in the meantime new, more violent and immediate musical forms had emerged: punk, new wave, hardcore, and the thousand offshoots of heavy metal. Contropotere drew profitable lessons from all these movements, absorbing Discharge's subversive charge and Voivod's inhuman aesthetic, the trash explosions of Metallica and the gloomy deceleration of the Melvins. This is why, even starting out from hardcore, their music fits fully within the metal genealogy that runs from trash to sludge and doom, and which over the last two decades has spawned hybrid bands such as Neurosis, Today Is The Day and Sunn O))). Although their stylistic language has more friction than common ground with prog-rock, Contropotere were "progressive" above all in their approach: their tracks are often long, split into multiple sections and prone to shifts in rhythm and register. Indeed, "La chiave del tempo", one of their fiercest and most shape-shifting tracks, even quotes the opening of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man"!
As for the lyrics, besides reaffirming anarcho-insurrectionist positions, they tackle themes tinged with existentialism and esotericism. So while "Urizen" draws on William Blake's visionary gnosticism, the long, blood-soaked "Urragan" extols pagan sacrifice. Then again, "Demoni e dei" could be a possible soundtrack to Bosch's apocalyptic paintings, while "Clonazione" is an alienating post-nuclear collage. All devastating tracks, which can be found across the band's two extraordinary historic albums: "Nessuna speranza, nessuna paura" (1989) and "Il seme della devianza" (1991). The only difference between the two is that the former is wrapped in a dark aura that shows itself not only in the heaviness and brutality of the sound, as would later be the case with its successor, but also in the tribal rhythms and occult psychedelic weave, somewhat akin to certain strands of Californian trance. Both records, in any case, should be handled with caution: we Italians aren't used to music this extreme and abyssal.

7. The paths of pop are endless

This is a journey full of surprises, starting from "O sole mio" and arriving – for now – at the most radical extremes of metal. A strange journey, destined to have no single destination, because its final stretch is a crossroads whose branches are wildly heterogeneous, each direction leading somewhere different. This is the great crossroads of Neapolitan pop, where the term "pop" is understood more as an attitude than as a precisely defined genre. Indeed, "pop" has always been a vast container into which practically anything can be poured: light, catchy rock songs, songs whose strength lies in melody, playful or larkish songs, songs that cross genres and styles without ever sacrificing immediate accessibility.

The first path, then, is that of pop-rock, and it leads straight to Edoardo Bennato, whose take on blues and rock'n'roll is filtered through a Pascoli-like sensibility, made of childlike wonder and amazement. Bennato's pop attitude lies not only in his knack for finding hooks that burrow into your head and never leave, but also in his approach – that of a dreaming adult – to themes tied to the extraordinary universe of childhood. Nothing is more pop(ular) than fairy tales, parallel universes in which things go the way we'd like them to in real life, where wickedness isn't absent – far from it – but is always destined to lose in the end. Bennato's songs, with their structural simplicity and their power of imagination, speak the same language as fairy tales; indeed, they become fairy tales themselves, picking up the threads of the great oral, collective storytelling tradition. But before fairy tales comes history, the kind that books have trained us to judge with a hatchet, sorting people into the good and the bad. The trilogy that forms the backbone of Bennato's discography opens precisely with an album bearing that very title: "I buoni e i cattivi" (1974). It's the second album by the Campanian rocker, a sort of concept album centered on our inability to tell good from evil in reality, unlike in fairy tales. Through circus-like blues numbers punctuated by a sparkling kazoo ("Ma che bella città", "Salviamo il salvabile"), disillusioned coming-of-age tales ("Un giorno credi", "Tira a campare") and a splendid acoustic ballad with a Stones-like flavor ("Facciamo un compromesso"), the album exposes the deceptive ways in which the ruling class constructs the categories of "good" and "bad". The roots of Edoardo Bennato's entire poetics are planted here. They would blossom in the second cornerstone of his output, "Puppet without strings" (1977), which reinterprets "The Adventures of Pinocchio" through adult eyes.

Among the many interpretations that Collodi's tale lends itself to, Bennato chooses the darkest one, stepping outside the reassuring readings offered by films and cartoons. There's an echo here of what a Naples-by-adoption figure, Benedetto Croce, wrote about Collodi's novel: "The wood from which Pinocchio is carved is humanity itself." In "È stata tua la colpa", the character of Pinocchio is portrayed as a sort of Adam who willingly abandons his own personal earthly paradise. He no longer inhabits the world of dreamlike objects – puppets free to be themselves within the puppet theater – but has become human, vulnerable to the flattery of social climbers and swindlers ("Il gatto e la volpe") and an easy pawn on the chessboard of those who, from above, can impose actions and thoughts on him. Now it's "Mangiafuoco" pulling his strings, an allegory for a devious power that uses the intelligentsia – the keepers of knowledge – to control and isolate anyone who doesn't conform to precise social dictates ("Tu grillo parlante", "Dotti, medici e sapienti"). The designated victims of this system are society's most fragile members, embodied by the story's only female character in "Fata" ("E forse è per vendetta e forse è per paura o solo per pazzia, ma da sempre tu sei quella che paga di più, se vuoi volare ti tirano giù e se comincia la caccia alle streghe, la strega sei tu"). The album is no less accomplished on a purely musical level, boasting great variety both in styles (irresistible honky-tonk, radio-friendly rock'n'roll, ironic waltzes, dusty blues, echoes of the most melancholy Neil Young) and in instrumental choices (vibraphones, slide guitars, strings, trumpets and saxophones). In short, "Puppet without strings" is what you'd call an undisputed masterpiece.
"Sono solo canzonette" (1980), the third installment of Bennato's sacred trilogy, follows in the footsteps of "Puppet without strings". This time the source fairy tale is that of Peter Pan. Unlike Pinocchio's story in the masterpiece from three years earlier, though, it isn't developed across the tracklist in a narratively cohesive way. The fantastical world created by James Matthew Barrie in 1902 is, for Bennato, merely a pretext for crafting a musical arabesque on the indispensability of dreaming. So in the far-west rock'n'roll of "Sono solo canzonette", the guitar becomes a sword, and the listener a fearless pirate venturing across inhospitable islands (the lullaby for bagpipe-like ciaramella and strings of "Nel covo dei pirati") where, to the beat of dixieland fanfares and rough glam riffs, one might run into old drunkards ("Dopo il liceo che potevo far") and self-styled revolutionaries ("Il rock di Capitan Uncino"). Growing up doesn't mean giving up on imagination, warns the tribal funk of "Ma che sarà". The enchanting "L'isola che non c'è", with its dreamy acoustic arpeggios cradling fairy-dusted harmonica notes, delivers the definitive warning: if we stop searching for the island that doesn't exist, if we suppress the child within us, then we will already have stopped living. And they call them little tunes!

The second path of Neapolitan pop is that of the melodic song. Thinking about it, in Neapolitan music of the last two or three decades, new songs worthy of joining the classics of the Neapolitan melodic tradition have been scarce. Sure, monuments should be erected to Roberto Murolo and Fausto Cigliano for the stubbornness with which they shielded the classic Neapolitan song from the neo-melodic plague, yet the invaluable contribution of the two guitarists to the classic songbook remains confined to the realm of reinterpretation. So the only two songs of a new generation that have managed to strike straight at the heart, lodging themselves in the collective memory the way "O sole mio" or "Era de Maggio" once did, are "Caruso" – written in 1986 by the late Lucio Dalla – and "Cu'mme", a song made famous in 1991 by the duet between Mia Martini and Murolo himself but written by Enzo Gragnaniello. It's with this song that the Neapolitan singer-songwriter earned himself a place in history. Yet it would be unfair to tie his name to just one song, however magnificent. Over the course of his career, Gragnaniello has written other pieces capable at times of reviving the classic tradition (the delicate whisper of "Senza voce"), at times of updating its form without betraying its nature (the poetic "Senza tiempo"), even trying his hand at Sanremo alongside Ornella Vanoni with the smooth "Alberi". That was 1999; the following year, that same stage would see the triumph of the Caserta natives Avion Travel with the passionate love dissertation of "Sentimento", an extraordinarily refined piece – both in its melodic openings and its orchestral arrangement – by the standards of the festival. That well-deserved win closed out fifteen years of intense artistic activity, during which Peppe Servillo's band had captivated Michael Nyman with another Sanremo song, "Dormi e sogna", and collaborated with Arto Lindsay. The tireless American experimentalist had produced "Cirano" in 1999, the band's most ambitious album, wrapping harmonically delicate songs such as "La chiave inglese" and "L'astronauta" in a synthetic, distorted patina achieved through an "in vitro" treatment of sounds and rhythms.

One of the average Neapolitan's undeniable qualities is their good-natured irony, the inventiveness with which they can poke fun at others and at themselves. A third path into Neapolitan pop, then, could be traced through that crescendo of oddities that climbs – or descends, depending on your point of view – from eccentric formulas all the way to sheer larking about. Let's take it step by step. Eccentric, certainly, is the operatic pop of Gennaro Cosmo Parlato.
A sort of effeminate Charlie Chaplin figure, Parlato took his first steps in the wake of the unlucky yet talented German musician Klaus Nomi, blending Italian melody, campy theatricality and operatic singing. Many will know him for his TV appearances on Chiambretti's shows, but it would be a serious mistake to dismiss him as a sideshow act. His repertoire is made up mostly of chic, often delightful reworkings of other people's songs. Just listen to his sprightly versions of Italian classics like "Maledetta primavera", tinted with doo-wop colors, or "Non voglio mica la luna", turned into a flashy tango, to be convinced. These, along with other original covers of old Italian hits, can be found on the album "Che cosa c'è di strano?" (2005), followed the next year by "Remainders", on which Parlato sets his sights on Eighties evergreens like "Material Girl", "Call Me" and "Billie Jean".
A step beyond mere eccentricity had already been taken back in 1980 by the legendary Shampoo, the only cover band in the world to have had a genuine reason to exist. Two reasons, actually: the first was to follow up on the prank pulled in 1976 by a Naples radio station, which, on the occasion of the Napoli-Liverpool friendly football match, had claimed the reunited Beatles would make a guest appearance. The second was to prove just how universal the Fab Four's songs really were, to the point that their lyrics could be swapped out – replaced, say, with lyrics in Neapolitan dialect – without denting their sonic recognizability. Thus was born "In Naples 1980-1981", one of the greatest cult albums ever made in Italy, whose cover artwork parodies the two famous Beatles compilations, the Red and Blue albums, right from the start. Shampoo's world was a kind of parallel universe in which the Beatles – with their legendary look, unmistakable vocal inflections and immortal melodies – were reborn in the shadow of Vesuvius. In some cases it's genuinely hard to spot the trick, because Neapolitan phonetics blend into the songs' original meter until they merge, like some bizarre grammelot, with the English language. So on a first listen it's tough to make out "Tengo e guai" inside "Tell Me Why", "Chist è o scià" inside "Twist And Shout", "Peppe" inside "Help". The point is that the imitation is so precise, and the Beatles' songs so deeply ingrained in memory, that the brain keeps running on autopilot until some clarifying word snaps you out of it.
When the mockery moves on from Shampoo-style parody to crude insults, trivial vulgarities and sheer larking about, then it's time for the Squallor. Truth be told, only two of the band's four members – Alfredo Cerruti and Totò Savio – were Neapolitan; the other two were a Milanese (Daniele Pace) and a Florentine (Giancarlo Bigazzi). All were prominent authors of Italian pop music who, like Dr. Jekyll, vented their basest instincts by turning into Squallor, the Mr. Hyde of the Italian song. Their inclusion in this survey is justified by the fact that it was precisely in Neapolitan that Squallor sang their filthiest, funniest songs. But make no mistake: even though what stands out is their irreverent, Dadaist spirit, Squallor remained highly refined musicians ("Cornutone", "O' ricuttaro nnamurato" and "O tiempo se ne va", for instance, are songs that – had they not been sacrificed on the merciful altar of tomfoolery – could easily have ended up in the repertoire of many respected singers) and stylistically eclectic (their catalogue ranges from the chamber music of "Veramon" to the politically incorrect rock'n'roll of "Radio Cappelle", by way of the irresistible flamenco of "Unisex").

There remains, at this point, a fourth path: that of cultural cross-pollination and musical hybrids. The path of the stateless, who don't know where they're going but know where they come from. From Africa. The place from which the Carthaginian general Hannibal set out to crush the Roman army and conquer the territories of southern Italy. "Figli di Annibale" is the title of the song that in 1992 revealed the immense talent of Almamegretta. The track was later included on their official debut "Animamigrante", an album that imported Massive Attack's trip-hop in real time – the Bristol group were so taken with Almamegretta that they invited them to record a remix of their own "Karmacoma" – but recast it in an Afro-Mediterranean key. The black heartbeat of the revolutionary "Blue Lines" tossed into a postmodern centrifuge hip-hop, reggae, dub, soul and the shadowy new wave of the Pop Group and their producer Dennis Bovell. To these ingredients the Neapolitan combo added one that made "Animamigrante"'s recipe utterly distinctive: typically Neapolitan melodic lines sung by a voice – Raiz's – well versed in Middle Eastern inflections. "If you know history, you know where the color of the blood running through your veins comes from"; so it's only natural that "'O bbuono e 'o malamente" revisits Bill Laswell's ethno-lounge, that "Fattallà" shuttles between Kingston and Piazza del Gesù, that "Sudd" blurs the line between the Spanish Quarters and Moroccan casbahs, and that "O' cielo pe' cuscino" forges a new form of tammurriata-dub. This last experiment would later continue on a couple of tracks ("Sanacore", "Ammore nemico") from their second album, "Sanacore" (1995), produced by a sound wizard like Adrian Sherwood. Compared to its predecessor, "Sanacore" is stylistically less dynamic but lyrically more intense, thanks to the wandering, feminine melodies of "O sciore cchiù felice", "Pe' dint' 'e viche addò nun trase 'o mare", "Nun te scurdà" and "Se stuta 'o fuoco". It's hard, then, to say which of these first two sensational entries in their discography is the better one. One might perhaps lean toward the first, for its combative spirit and the shock of the new.

Among all those in Naples who have learned from the lesson of Almamegretta, by far the most talented are 24 Grana, who in the late Nineties debuted with two albums – "Loop" and "Metaversus" – deeply rooted in the musical tradition of Campania while also touched by reggae and dub. As the millennium turned, however, the band led by Francesco Di Bella swerved forcefully toward harsher sounds drawn from Anglo-American indie-rock. A path that recently led them into the recording studio of the legendary Steve Albini, ten years after "K album", the record that in 2001 had marked their guitar-oriented turn. The nine songs' titles all bear the mark of the letter "K", which is evidently where the album's title comes from — one that, in hindsight, could also be read as a "key-album", the key record of their discography. The resigned psalm of "Kevlar" is the sapphire that shines with its own light amid other gems that reflect a Yo La Tengo-esque eclecticism (the wonderfully abrasive "Pikkola kanzone per K", the unthinkable jam of "Kanzone del fumo", the post-punk regurgitation of "Kanzone anarkika") and a psychedelic streak that looks to Pixies and Flaming Lips (the distorted ballad "E kose ka spakkano", the acid-dreamlike "Kanzone del pisello"). The follow-up to "K album" is "Underpop", released in 2003. As the title suggests, it's an exercise in underground pop in which Italian claims more space in the lyrics, the songs are catchier, and the sound overall takes on a freshness unmatched elsewhere in 24 Grana's discography. "Underpop" doesn't have the stature of its predecessor, but it's an absolutely delightful record. Their guiding star now seems to be Radiohead, both the electrified explosions of "The Bends" ("Vivo in un furgone", "Giornata psicologica mente impossibile") and the leaden electro-pop of "Amnesiac" ("Psiconauta"). There are a few naïve moments, but they're redeemed by four dizzying highlights that come, in tracklist order: the manifesto against pain that is "Canto pe'nun suffrì", the hermetic electro-acoustic "La neve", the resigned reggae of "Napule tana", and above all the desperate, moving appeal of "L'attenzione", which in its opening bars conjures up Battiato's "E ti vengo a cercare" as filtered through CSI.

The path of cross-pollination would also be the one taken by 99 Posse, but this piece intends to celebrate the musicians of Naples, its artists, not hypocritical loudmouths spewing crude, pseudo-rebellious slogans just to stir up rich kids playing at revolution in their squats. Their tiresome blend of rap, reggae and ska is nothing but a decoy meant to stoke social and political hatred and promote a culture of lawlessness and contempt for authority, in areas the state already struggles to keep a presence in. It's an easy sport to insult the indulgent Neapolitan police officer, whose worst abuse of power has been to clear out, perhaps even reluctantly, the Officina 99 squat. Naples, however difficult a city it may be, is certainly not the African-American ghetto of Public Enemy, who really did manage to channel Black rage over police brutality into a liberating "Fuck the Police". And it's not the same kind of "fuck off": the gap between the two is the same gap that separates the authenticity of Basquiat – who used street art to express his own condition, human before it was social – from the radical-chic provocations of Banksy.

8. What remains at the end of the journey (a closing dedication)

At the end of this long journey through the many forms of Neapolitan song, what remains is the awareness that Naples's extraordinary cultural heritage – not just musical – cannot become an excuse to hide its negligence, its shamefully overlooked problems, and the inert self-pity of a people who have yet to fully make the most of the enormous potential at their disposal. More than two hundred years after Goethe, Naples remains a paradise inhabited by too many devils, who tarnish its image, but also by a few poor souls and a great many, many decent people trying to rebuild real hope on the rubble left behind by crime, neglect, mismanagement, and also by the economic and political isolation to which this capital of the South has been consigned for around a century and a half. And so Orson Welles's line from "The Third Man" comes to mind: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of peace and democracy – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Perhaps the tragedies and failures Naples must face day after day are the price a cynical fate has demanded in exchange for its glorious artistic history, its prestigious theatrical tradition, and its boundless musical output. Like a curse, a perpetual losing game. Indeed, Naples is one long lost bet, a magnificent dream slowly dying in the eternal wait for "'a nuttata" to pass. And every so often, for a moment, it seems as though dawn might finally be arriving for Naples, as though aborted hopes are about to rise again from their own ashes. All it takes is a glimpse of the view from Posillipo, an old melody, a bit of theatrical sketch comedy, or a walk through the city's "artistic" metro stations. All it takes is Caravaggio's Seven Acts of Mercy, Guido Reni at San Martino, Titian at Capodimonte. This lost, sometimes bewildered paradise, in order to redeem its own desperate condition, would need nothing more than the beauty that already surrounds it. Many Neapolitans haven't understood this, or haven't wanted to. To all the others, to the Neapolitans who, in spite of everything, keep believing in the saving power of beauty, this article is dedicated.

Paintings:

Andy Warhol – 8 Vesuvius, 1985
Henrique Bernardelli – Tarantella (detail), 1886
Anton Sminck van Pitloo – Castel dell'Ovo Seen from the Beach (detail), 1824

(04/29/2013)

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