Pino Daniele

Marzo: nu poco chiove

e n’ato ppoco stracqua

torna a chiòvere, schiove;

ride ‘o sole cu ll’acqua.

Mo nu cielo celeste,

mo n’aria cupa e nera,

mo d’ ‘o vierno ‘e ‘tempeste,

mo n’aria ‘e Primmavera.

N’auciello freddigliuso

wait till the sun comes out,

on the rain-soaked ground

the violets are sighing…

Catarì, what more do you want?

Understand me, my heart,

March, you know it, it's you,

and this bird here is me

(Salvatore Di Giacomo, 1898)

October 1979: the beloved, revolutionary Seventies are drawing to a close. Italy is still a country grappling with a thousand problems and more, unable to confront and resolve its endless political and social contradictions. A nation wounded and shattered by terrorist bombs and the fire of organized crime. Yet in those very months, the musical soul of the country was living through one of its most fertile seasons. Everywhere you turned there were Dalla, Conte, Bennato, Vecchioni, Guccini and De André. The unforgettable Stone Castle Studios in Carimate gathered the cream of Italian singer-songwriting. These were the golden years of the cantautori's revenge, when poetry and music moved in lockstep, fusing into an artistic embrace that would never again be so intense and daring. The chains of censorship were by then a distant memory, and the radio waves teemed with hits. Italians finally felt the need to shout their discontent and their anger to the world. Variety-show escapism was no longer enough, and the search for release now pointed toward altogether different solutions. There was a whole sonic universe beyond the peninsula still largely unexplored, and the time had come to freely enrich one's own land with the most varied flavors.

In those months, Pino Daniele was a young and promising Neapolitan singer-songwriter, but above all a guitarist unique of his kind, about to walk into the aforementioned Castle Studios to create what would become one of the defining statements of his career and of Italian music. Over the previous three years, his talent had thoroughly won over an entire city, and in particular Claudio Poggi, a record producer at Emi Italiana, who after hearing his first demos decided to bet everything, eyes closed, on that shy young man with the elusive artistic spark.

Pino came from the San Giuseppe district of Naples and already had two albums to his name, "Terra mia" (1977) and the self-titled "Pino Daniele" (1979); he was twenty-four, but already a seasoned musician, sure of his own abilities. After all, his artistic potential had been at its peak since a young age. As soon as he came of age, Pino wrote what would become the anthem of an entire city, the singular testament to both his enchantment and his subsequent disenchantment, a tribute to its beauty and his own deepest reckoning: "Napule è".

In this sense, to fully grasp Pino Daniele's artistic essence, his DNA, one must step into the alleys of his city and unearth the secrets and spirits that define it. Vesuvius — not by chance the symbol of Neapolitan ferment, which from the humps of its magma generates inspiration and secretes the most hidden fears — is at once an emblem of terror and a symbol of vital force. We are in the midst of a revolution in customs that in Naples has never truly had either a beginning or an end. A class struggle, in which the individual seeks itself through historical identity and the raging bourgeois condition; the clash between being and becoming, the upward drive and the oblivion of the real, passionate dirt-road of lived events. Art becomes a leader that intercepts impulses simply by recounting the new currents that unconsciously mix and shape social life.

The theatre of Viviani, of Di Giacomo before him and of De Filippo afterward, was the first attempt to analyze the transformation of the individual and its coarser, more decadent implications; that revolution, which both followed and preceded the ferment, was gathered up musically by the Neapolitan renaissance movement, better known as Napolitan Power. A cultural-artistic movement, it was linked to the more famous black power movement whose footsteps it followed, though unlike the latter it was concerned with the territory and its ethnic mutations.

"Nero a metà", the Neapolitan singer-songwriter's third album, is almost a offspring of the black revolution, of an intense awakening of the olive-skinned, playfully suffering soul of its performers. It's remarkable how one of the most successful attempts at world music, or global music, found its fullest synthesis in a socially ghettoized territory, caught between sea and marble, between domination and rebellion, between light and shadow. Sealing this improbable, dazzling amalgam is the presence in the studio of musicians of the caliber of Gigi De Rienzo, Ernesto Vitolo, Agostino Marangolo, Aldo Mercurio, Mauro Spina, James Senese, Rosario Jermano, Tony Cercola Astà aka Tony Esposito, Karl Potter, Bruno De Filippi and Enzo Avitabile. A genuine squad of talents ready to follow the young singer-songwriter through his endless, ever-shifting sonic contaminations.

"I say i' sto ccà", which opens the album, absorbs the revolutionary lesson of Carosone, who had already experimented in the past with blending the Neapolitan language with the American English of Anglo-Saxon stock. That gestation, and the birth that followed, now produces the clear effects of the combustion that the war had ignited in Naples. Eduardo's 'a nuttata, long since left behind, now finds an adult generation reclaiming a social standing and, with it, a fresh, new musical identity; Mario Musella — singer of the Showmen, who passed away shortly before the album's release, and to whose memory the work is dedicated — a son of the war becomes the father of a new Neapolitan identity, one that finds, in the notes of James Senese's tenor sax, its eternal inscription on stone and in the Neapolitan breath.

The musical catharsis of "Nero a metà" lives on a thin line between congenital compassion and delirious hilarity; the lyrics ride a dark suffering, as in "Voglio di più", only to then celebrate the goliardic whimsy of "A me me piace 'o blues". This artistic dichotomy stands out even more sharply in the shifting genres, which the artist himself would jokingly dub "taramblu", poised between the popular spirit of the tarantella, South American rumba and Delta blues. The funky groove draws its sword on several occasions - "Musica Musica", "A testa in giù", and the aforementioned "I say i' sto cca'" and "A me me piace o' blues" - with a soft, seductive sound that indulges itself without ever tipping into cloying mannerism.

This musical breakthrough is consolidated in the Latin-flavoured rumba notes of "Appocundria". Yet the performance remains merely a pretext for conveying a state of mind: its prophetic words unite an entire people who express melancholy as a conscious epiphany (“Appocundria me scoppia/ ogne minuto 'mpietto/ peccè passanno forte/ haje sconcecato 'o lietto/ appocundria 'e chi è sazio/ e dice ca è diuno/ appocundria 'e nisciuno…”); domestic imagery and primal needs paint a canvas of dark hues dancing over warm, reassuring musical velvet.

On that same fragile thread lies "Quanno chiove", a song both wrenching and liberating, through which the spirit of redemption and the yearning for rebirth find their allegorical translation in the purity and simplicity of a weather event now reread as a saving grace. The scugnizzo soul and the thoroughly Neapolitan irreverence, masterfully expressed just a year earlier in the celebrated "Je so' pazzo", catch their breath again in "Nun me scoccià", with Daniele playing both minstrel and provocateur. The fusion theme that opens the sweet "E so cuntento 'e sta'" reaffirms his skill at weaving melodic tapestries of multifaceted hues, variations with a strikingly distinctive touch, unrepeatable in their enveloping singularity.

The gentle ballad "Alleria" evokes another theme so dear to the Neapolitan people: the need for joy as an antidote to the anxieties of practical and emotional existence; the voice and its outbursts float in the air through gentle passages of piano and double bass, sealing the quintessential mood of the Neapolitan spirit.

The charisma and talent of the album's individual tracks would culminate in the concert for two hundred thousand people in Piazza del Plebiscito - the very place where it all ended - and would lead the artist toward numerous collaborations with internationally renowned musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Alphonso Johnson, Steve Gadd and Richie Evans on the albums that followed. But the genuinely global sound, ahead of its time, would make this sonic work a unicum et hibridum both for the artist and for those who came after him.

Pino passed away before his final appearance in Piazza del Plebiscito, the same square that had once seen parades of sovereigns and viceroys, blessed and cursed in equal measure. The people demanded that their favourite son return home for one last farewell, to feel, once more, a magical suspension between poetry and dismay, between silent remains and the echoes of a life gone by.

"Masaniello è turnat'", he brought joy and healing to his people, and then became King.

The King is dead. Long live the King!

Photo in box by Antonio Siringo

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15/03/2015