John Turturro: The Sound of Naples

From nobody to somebody is, instead the story of James Senese, saxophonist and jazz great. Son of a black American soldier and a Neapolitan mother, “Jamesiello” or Little James as he was nicknamed by the locals, was befriended by a neighborhood girl, Sofia. But the color of his skin was a literal marker and he was taunted with shouts of “Nigger!” “I was lucky, I made something of myself . . . But how can you forget something like that?” His soulful version of “Passione,” performed with a small ensemble at the Bluestone Jazz Club in the Santa Lucia district, is interspersed with wartime film of the bombing of Naples and the March 1944 eruption of Vesuvio. Mixed-race children of African-American soldiers and Neapolitan women eventually grew up and, in their 20s and 30s, opened jazz clubs in their city, cross-fertilizing two indigenous musical traditions. Those children are the subject of “Tammuriata Nera” which chronicles their appearance on the streets of Naples carry traditional names like Ciro, Peppe, Gennaro, but irrevocably marked by the color of their skin and the “sins” of their fathers.

 

 

Naples is a tricky subject for any artist. How is one to balance the two competing and contradictory images of the city? “See Naples and die!” was the cultural imperative of the Grand Tour and the age of Romanticism. Chaos, Camorra and trash are the flip image. Seductive, exasperating, bewildering. A death-haunted city that flaunts its vitality; a melancholy city that revels in its celebrations; a city beloved and hated by its own inhabitants who left by the millions, scattered to the four corners of the world. A city marked by longing, loss and nostalgia. “Passione” captures these characteristics with verve. Naples is a “city painted in sound,” Turturro notes, and, like many poor places in the world, “music is a form of emotional and spiritual transportation . . . a form of prayer.” 

 

 

* Stanislao G. Pugliese is Professor of History and Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at Hofstra University. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Dancing on a Volcano: A Cultural History of Naples.