James Senese, I knew him well

This time our black sax giant didn’t make it. And James Senese, hospitalized for more than two weeks for serious lung problems, unfortunately left us. James had already been on dialysis for a few years and heroically alternated his concerts and appearances in records or shows with the days in which he was forced to undergo therapy. Incredibly, given his almost octogenarian age, he blew his saxophones at the top of his lungs and sang with that voice that only a black man from Vesuvius could have. We all hoped until the end that once again his bad skin would make it; last year he had already been hospitalized in serious conditions but was released.

I’ve seen James play since we were both kids, I entered the world of rock professionally by starting to write about our new Neapolitan music and acting as press office for Antonio Taccogna, first producer of James and the Showmen, the group he founded with Mario Musella and Franco del Prete. (both disappeared, and which he will now be able to join in the musicians’ paradise). With James and another member of the Showmen, Giuseppe Botta, I also wrote the lyrics to a song, “What happens inside me”.

Then from the Showmen Senese he formed Napoli Centrale, again with Franco Del Prete, produced by my close friend and colleague Raffaele Cascone, who on the radio hosted “For you young”, a cult program of rock and committed music of the 70s. Napoli Centrale was the first truly great Neapolitan jazz rock group: and I like to remember, as I have also written several times in my book “Napule’s Power”, that thanks to the presence of a half-Neapolitan and half-American musician I conceived and carried forward a “contaminated” musical movement, the first great mix of genres in the world of our rock. And I have written several times about the added value of this movement thanks to its “negritude”; I immediately gave Napule’s Power a subtitle, “The Negroes of Vesuvius”, and James was the natural protagonist of our negritude, of which we have been proud for over 50 years.

The bond between James and another “child of war” is historic, the inimitable blues singer Mario Musella, son of a Native American with whom James began to work professionally as a musician as a teenager, frequenting together those clubs in the port of Naples frequented by our “allies” (or conquerors) of the Neapolitan NATO bases who in their thousands came down from the aircraft carriers every evening, invading those places where music was played and there was alcohol and “girls”. Mario, after some great successes with the Showmen, left very young, but that’s history. Pino Daniele, when he wrote “Nero a mezzo” dedicating it to Mario, obviously also had James in mind. Everyone knows that the word “power” of the movement derives from “Black Power”, the American revolutionary movement of which Senese has always been our great testimonial.

I have written it several times, but I like to remember it here too: he himself knew how to joke and play down his being the son of a Neapolitan “signurina”, in love with a black marine like many other heroines who attended the Nato bases when Naples was like Gaza, and these “heroines”, who the marines who disembarked every evening from Forrestal called “signurine” looking for company and distraction from the ugliness of war, saved entire families from starvation. It must certainly have been those chromosomes so full of African-American rhythm that he had in his blood that made him a unique musician in Naples, in Italy and in the world. His sax, and his voice so full of soul and blues and at the same time so Neapolitan, were truly unique. I remember by heart the words of one of the most beautiful blues who sang on the first album of Napoli Centrale, “‘O my grandfather was seventy years old when he took his last breath, he said: And let’s go, James, I’ll get away with it, I don’t want them too to have died next to me”. How much popular poetry and how much humanity James has always put into the many solo or group records he made in your intense life as a composer and performer!

Those who knew him superficially saw him as grumpy or unsociable, those of us, his friends, musicians, writers, professionals, who knew him well knew that his apparently rough exterior hid a lot of spirituality, a lot of love for music, for his family and for his closest colleagues and collaborators. When Pino Daniele began to have success, he first looked to James to have him fixed in his lineup. But it is worth remembering that it was James himself who got the very young debutant Pino Daniele to play first. Having entered the Napoli Centrale lineup, he asked James if he could play the electric guitar with him. James replied: “But I already have the guitarist…”. Then, intrigued by that good young musician who was so eager to get hands-on in public, he said to him: “But do you know what bass is?”. Pino replied yes but that he didn’t have a bass, and James in his historic generosity told him: “I’ll buy it for you”.

I still like to remember an episode from almost 50 years ago that I personally witnessed. At the Montreux International Jazz Festival the Italians who had been invited were Perigeo, Tony Esposito, Tullio De Piscopo and Napoli Centrale, and I remember that while they were rehearsing, four foreign artists sat in the front row who followed their sound checks with great interest: they were Weather Report, Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius. Joe approached James and said “But you are exceptional, you make music… like ours!”.

James has recorded dozens of records alone or with groups with exceptional artists such as Gigi De Rienzo, Bob Fix, Ernesto Vitolo, but also with many international big names. Great musician, performer, composer, generous to the end, despite his serious ailments, he was truly a giant on stage. And the inhabitants of his neighborhood consider him like a giant. When collaborating with Stefano Senardi and Marco Spagnoli for the film “Nero a mezzo” I asked James to intervene in the film to be interviewed by Stefano, I proposed a location that he, out of modesty, did not find suitable… I suggested to Spagnoli and Senardi to film him in his neighborhood, under the mural that portrays him. On the left there is Maradona, further on Pino Daniele and then him, his image, a gigantic mural dedicated to him on a 10-storey building under which James was interviewed

Napule’s Power is in mourning, all of us are: without James Senese the Movement certainly has less “Power” from today.

The photo in the article is by Tony Occhiello, the one below is by Renato Marengo