Napoli Centrale

Napoli Centrale were the culmination of a long journey. It all began with a post-beat band, Showmen, whose ranks included, among others, singer and bassist Mario Musella, drummer Franco Del Prete, and horn players Elio D'Anna and James Senese. Musella and Senese were both children of war, born to local mothers and unknown fathers who had stayed in Naples for a few months during the Second World War before returning to the United States — one a Native American, the other African American. This shared background made them a mirror of the upheavals their city had gone through, something Senese always took pride in pointing out.

Showmen were one of the first Italian bands to play rhythm and blues, though their repertoire consisted mostly of covers and the record industry never gave them their due. Around 1970 Musella left the band to pursue an unsuccessful solo career, and the group, having lost its bearings, fell apart. D'Anna would soon join Osanna, one of the most important names in Italian progressive rock.
Once the initial disorientation had passed, Del Prete and Senese regrouped as Showmen 2, bringing in new members. Senese, while keeping his role on sax, also began to sing. He would later insist that he never saw himself as a singer and had only started out of necessity, to put an end to rumors that he had driven Musella out. Senese and Musella, in any case, remained friends until 1979, the year the latter died of liver cirrhosis at the age of thirty-four.

The sound of Showmen 2 drifted toward progressive rock, which by then was creeping into almost every Italian band. But there was only time for a single album, released in 1972 on the local label B.B.B., which made little impact.
Senese, who because of his origins felt a strong bond with American culture (so much so that he would claim it was the only culture truly capable of producing great musicians), already had his eye on the new directions jazz was taking.
These were the years when Herbie Hancock created "Head Hunters", the sacred text of jazz-funk; when Miles Davis was releasing increasingly rhythmic electric jazz albums (culminating in the proto-drum 'n' bass of "Rated X"); when Weather Report were beginning to smooth out their sound, moving briskly toward the polished — if still restless — style that would become their trademark.
British progressive rock, which Showmen 2 had interpreted in their own peculiar way through their soul influences, was gradually losing appeal in favor of these more distinctly Black explorations.

Napoli Centrale were thus born in 1974. Alongside Senese and Del Prete, the lineup featured Mark Harris on electric piano and Tony Walmsley on bass, an American and a Briton living in Naples, fully integrated into the local scene (Harris would later become a sought-after session musician).
Their deal with Ricordi is proof enough of a bygone era, when even the biggest record labels were willing to invest in the most experimental music. Within a few months, the debut album, self-titled after the band, hit the market.
The iconic cover shows the band members from behind, walking alongside two children down a muddy country road, in a bare landscape of pruned trees, leaden sky and barbed-wire fences (Riccardo Venturi of AWS has suggested a parallel — one that turns out to be anything but far-fetched — with the boundaries of concentration camps).

The image is no accident: the countryside of Napoli Centrale is fierce and inhospitable. The opening track, "Campagna", makes this clear right away, with Senese singing: "Chiove o jesce 'o sole, chi è bracciante a San Nicola, cu' 'a butteglia chino 'e vino, tutte 'e juorne va a zappà. Campagna, campagna, còmme è bella 'a campagna, ma è cchiù bella pe' 'o padrone, ca se ènghie 'e sacche d'oro, e 'a padrona sua signora, ca se 'ngrassa sempre e chiù, ma chi zappa chesta terra, pe' 'nu muorzo 'e pane niro, cu' 'a campagna se ritrova stracquo, strutto e culo rutto".
There is no room here for the idyllic vision of the countryside painted by modern bourgeois, metropolitan culture. Napoli Centrale see it instead as a place of exploitation and oppression, the domain of the caporalato labor racket. Del Prete, who wrote most of the lyrics, came in fact from Frattamaggiore, a town north of Naples that at the time was still a major agricultural center: he had likely witnessed since childhood the toil of friends and relatives, breaking their backs as farmhands for a pittance.

Social commitment, howled at full volume by Senese's roaring soul voice, turns Napoli Centrale into a mouthpiece for the conscience of Naples — the Naples of noble spirit and high ideals that refuses to bow to the cultural decay imposed by harsh living conditions, themselves a consequence of organized crime's direct grip on the city's economic lifeblood. What Napoli Centrale offer is a genuine form of artistic resistance against the injustices that have always run through that city and threaten to disgrace the absolute value of its history and culture.

"'A gente 'e Bucciano" is dedicated to a small town in the inland Campania region, which at the time was being depopulated by emigration. Exploitation is portrayed as inescapable. Even fleeing to northern Italy did little to improve most people's quality of life: the arms worn out in the fields were now being worn out on assembly lines instead. The song also highlights the psychological toll on the working class, left demoralized by an endless, hopeless grind: "Ma 'a fàmma è chhiù forte d'ammore pe' 'a terra e 'a gente 'e Bucciano è emigrata nel Nord, nun puteva cchiù campà, mo va in fabbrica a faticà, jettann' 'o stess' sànghe e 'a salute e in cchiù se sente gente fernuta".
By the turn of the new millennium, Napoli Centrale's lyrics only partly apply to Italians, who have largely abandoned farm work, but the exploitation they describe persists, now borne by immigrants. Del Prete's words haven't really aged — they've simply changed subject.

While the philosophy and politics of Napoli Centrale belong mainly to Del Prete, the musical form and ethic are Senese's domain. As mentioned, it was he who pushed the band to shed the skin of Showmen 2 and move toward a sound blending the drive of jazz-rock with the polish of jazz fusion, largely thanks to the absence of electric guitar and to a saxophone that, though wild, powerful and relentlessly active, never tips into cacophony or noise for its own sake. Far from free jazz, his inspiration draws instead from electric jazz: Wayne Shorter rather than Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane (Senese would later profess great admiration for all of these names, but listening to his music it's clear the former carries far more weight than the others).

The guitars are never missed, not even for a moment, thanks to the pulse of the bass, equally at ease in virtuosic runs ("Vico primo Parise N. 8") and in more repetitive, hypnotic lines ("Viecchie, mugliere, muorte e criaturi"), and to the electric Fender piano, whose warm tone fills the gaps and thickens the textures, injecting the tracks with echo effects and small, independent melodies that trickle like streams through the grooves of the rhythm section and the sax solos.
The nods to the greats of American jazz fusion shouldn't suggest that Napoli Centrale's music is derivative. For one thing, the vocal parts — with their distinctly Mediterranean flavor — consistently follow song-form structures, bringing a sense of order and clarity to the instrumental digressions. What's more, even comparing them to their reference points, one notices that Weather Report wouldn't reach their own (relatively) pop phase until "Black Market", a full year later: up to that point, none of their records sounded as polished and hummable as Napoli Centrale's debut. And to top it off, despite doing without guitars, Napoli Centrale remain first and foremost a rock band, with all the structural and attitudinal consequences that entails.

The diversity of the lineup (Del Prete a native of the Campania countryside, Senese from the northern outskirts of Naples, the other two Anglo-Saxons transplanted to the city), the good fortune of being at one of Italy's creative hotspots (1970s Naples), the shrewdness to look beyond national borders, and a favorable moment in history: virtually every element needed to consider "Napoli Centrale" a landmark album is there.
The rest of the band's career is history: despite never achieving nationwide success, and despite splitting up and reforming multiple times, always revolving around Senese, the band has firmly established itself among the most important names in Italian music, extending its influence all the way to a giant like Pino Daniele, who came up playing bass for them in 1977-78.

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07/06/2020