SPECIAL OPENING EVENT
DANIELE SEPE – SEPÈ LE MOKÒ
Lemon Garden – San Benedetto
start 10.00 pm – > Tickets
Daniele Sepe with his sax gives voice to a libertarian and anarchic musical message. Born in Naples in 1960, Sepe is a sort of Frank Zappa of Neapolitan music: jazz, world music, rock, reggae mix in a polychrome fusion of styles. Music with often ‘committed’ content yet always capable of penetrating the popular soul.
Sepe made resistance a lifestyle: intellectual, political and above all artistic resistance. From his early debut (at sixteen with the Zezi, a workers’ group from Pomigliano d’Arco), to his intense apprenticeship as a session musician and accompanist (during the 1980s there was no record produced in Naples in which his saxophone was not heard : from Nino D’Angelo to Gino Paoli, Eduardo De Crescenzo, Nino Buonocore…), to the laborious emergence as a soloist. Luckily for him, his album Vite Losi (1993) struck a chord with the public and became an international success. Since then there has been a whirlwind of musical projects: nothing can contain Sepe’s expressive urgency. The recent experience of lockdowns has also demonstrated this. Unable to play live, he churned out records at a dizzying pace: Lockdown #1 (between soundtracks and Sonny Rollins), Lockdown #2 (with songs from the Canzoniere Terrestre), Direction Zappa (a live archive) and then again Truffe & Other Sturiellett’ Vol. 4 (in)cumplete classical und chamber miusik (with archival materials).
In this very Zappa-like production bulimia, ideas spark off one another: to crown this record relay came Sepè le Mokò, a tribute to the soundtracks of Totò’s films. Sepe had already paid homage to the prince of laughter in 1999 with Totò Sketches: a project with original music that had a very long live life (including screenings of Totò’s films). But Sepè le Mokò goes further: it draws directly from the soundtracks of films released between 1957 and 1962, written by composers such as Piero Piccioni, Armando Trovajoli, Lelio Luttazzi, Carlo Rustichelli, Alessandro Cicognini, Piero Umiliani. Music whose high jazz caliber has never been adequately valorised.
Event created in collaboration with Norbeat
Live Painting by Matthew Watkins
