album rating: ★★★★☆
Genre: Neapolitan song / world music / folk / canzone popolare. Napoletana is one of the most concentrated and emotionally powerful albums in the career of Enzo Avitabile (born Vincenzo Avitabile, Marianella, Naples, 1955), the saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer who has spent four decades at the intersection of Neapolitan musical tradition, jazz, soul, blues and world music. The album takes its name in conscious homage to Napoletana, the celebrated anthology of Neapolitan song recorded by Roberto Murolo, and constitutes an act of deeply felt cultural recovery: a tribute to the ancient song of the Neapolitan people — work songs, villanelle, devotional music, the music of the city's peripheral quartieri — rendered with radical simplicity. The sound palette is deliberately minimal and spare: Avitabile's voice, saxophone, sopranino and piffero; Umberto Leonardo on guitar; Marco Pescosolido on cello; Carlo Avitabile on percussion (cassa, tamburo, tamburino, castagnette). All twelve songs are written by Avitabile, with the exception of 'Il lamento dei mendicanti' (music by Matteo Salvatore) and the closing 'Carmela' (music by Salvatore Palomba and Sergio Bruni). The album's subtitle describes its intent: 'Voices of passions, traces of traditions, sounds of devotions for a very human and nobly popular metropolis that has never torn nature from its heart.'
Label: FolkClub Ethnosuoni / Sudarte (Italy), 2009 (catalogue number ES 5378). Reissued by Compagnia Nuove Indye (CNDL 25807) in 2012.
Producer: Not individually credited in publicly available sources; the album was a self-directed artistic project by Enzo Avitabile.
Recording studio: Not individually specified in publicly available sources; recorded in Italy.
Critical reception: Napoletana won the Targa Tenco 2009 for Best Album in Dialect — Italy's most prestigious award for singer-songwriters — and is widely regarded as one of the highlights of Avitabile's discography. The Italian review site Debaser called it 'a heartfelt and minimalistic tribute to Neapolitan culture', praising its 'sparse and minimal folk, free from the excesses and baroques of small and large orchestras.' The opening track 'Don Salvatò', described as delivering 'genuine chills, carried by the crystalline sound of the harp', and the closing 'Carmela' are particularly celebrated.
Commercial success: Napoletana established Avitabile's reputation well beyond the world music niche and opened the door to the high-profile collaborations that would characterise his subsequent albums — most notably Black Tarantella (2012), which featured Bob Geldof, David Crosby, Pino Daniele, Franco Battiato and Francesco Guccini, and which itself won the Targa Tenco 2012. Jonathan Demme (Oscar-winning director of Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs) subsequently made the documentary film Enzo Avitabile Music Life (2012), presented at the Venice Film Festival.
text generated by artificial intelligence — claude, sonnet 4.6 — free version, liable to contain errors