CITARELLA Nando & TAMBURI DEL VESUVIO
Carosonando

AFMCD 163

8032050013114
Alfa Music
Italia

 

A passionate homage to Renato Carosone’s music by the Neapolitan master of the frame drums with his group Tamburi del Vesuvio.
A reinterpretation of Carosone that has returned to the youthful strength of musical folk traditions and catchy rhythms. The classic pieces from the past have been infused with new life and vigour and given back to the people, who always were the true protagonists of Carosone’s songs.


At the beginning of it all there is Renato Carosone, his music, his songs, the original version, the archetype, and the unrepeatable Urtext that conditions and illuminates all of the successive versions. And then there are the cover versions, which are a way of making a hit song one’s own, by giving it a different interpretation, and a new musical setting that can be rather unexpected. It is an operation that involves a completely different creative investment, but that cannot be separated from the source and original template, and especially from the heady mix which led to the birth of the Carosone-sound: rhythm, swing, Africa, dance, street, rock 'n' roll, jazz, blues, oriental, burlesque, irony and the folk tradition.
A re-reading of his repertoire from the point of view of folk music (which is what Nando Citarella and his musicians have done on this record) certainly has to take all of these factors into consideration in order to go directly to the heart and soul of the tradition, or traditions, involved, first of all that of Naples and the region of Campania. The musicians of this land have a great feeling of respect for the sacred nature of their traditional music, as if it were a kind of energy that is at the foundation of Naples itself, and from which it is difficult to break away. Naples feeds on music with an energy that both absorbs it and redistributes it. Naples itself radiates Carosone, since even to this day there is no home or alleyway in the city that does not resonate to the sound of his songs.
But then there is Africa, where Carosone lived and played for almost ten years. He brought a sense of the exotic and the tribal from Africa to Naples, where he used it in his taste for the parody and in his attitude to rhythm (thanks to the vocine – or “little voices” – and the percussions of Gegé Di Giacomo), thereby anticipating the trends, often falsified, of the ethnic music of the ‘90s. There is often an African tribal and shamanic, hypnotic and primitive component in Carosone’s music, because on the stage he was a great sorcerer, irresistible and compelling. His songs became his shamanic journey and his flying carpet, that carried him everywhere he wanted to go.

In short, here we seem to have a reinterpretation of Carosone that has returned to the youthful strength of musical folk traditions and catchy rhythms, but also with a dimension that is reminiscent of “dining room music” (Kant), of “music that gives happiness and then goes away on tiptoe” (Sgalambro), and of “musical pills against sadness” (Manu Chao). These classic pieces from the past have thus been infused with new life and vigour and given back to the people, who always were the true protagonists of Carosone’s songs.