The 1970s were in Italy a sort of borderline between the old world and the new, in the arts as in the social context. In the musical framework they have distorted the traditional lines of the so-called light music, generating in this case in Naples, one of the most conservative cities in the musical field, a real revolution. Groups such as Napoli Centrale have been prophets who, by mixing traditional Neapolitan sounds with the rhythms of genres developed in distant countries but similar to the Neapolitan spirit, such as blues, funky or soul, have composed a chemistry of sounds in a mixture that today we would define glocal, or less stingingly world music. James Senese was its founder, assisted by talented musicians such as Franco Del Prete, drummer of Ivano Fossati’s Showmen, and Mark Harris, who later collaborated with Fabrizio De Andrè. Not to mention the period in which a then unknown boy, a certain Pino Daniele, played the bass. Having started playing in the city clubs, in a short time the group crossed the borders of the city’s fame making the new Neapolitan sounds known throughout Italy, becoming one of the leading formations on the national scene of that seminal decade. James Senese on the other hand, son of a Neapolitan mother and an African-American soldier who came to free us from the Nazi-fascist yoke, perfectly personified the new post-war Neapolitan mestizo culture, that ethnic and musical mix that was then being born and which soon redesigned the grammar of the contemporary Mediterranean sound. The wonderful and poignant sound of his sax remains one of the most intense and capable of restoring the meaning of those years, beautiful and terrible.
