The first station that “The train of the soul“, The new album by Enzo Avitabile, touched was that of the Ligabue house, with whom he wrote the first single launched, “Salvami”, whose text is a desperate search for help linked to the tragedy of migrations. “The collaboration with him came in a completely natural way – the 67-year-old Neapolitan artist recalls the genesis of the project – and he was very sweet and perfect”. Even in the eleven songs that ring one prestigious series of featuring (in addition to the Liga, Rocco Hunt, Jovanotti, Giuliano Sangiorgi, Biagio Antonacci, Edoardo Bennato, the Boomdabash, Guè, Speranza, Clementino), his multigenerational pop did not want to abdicate the social and globalist vocation, to which his conscience has always aspirated. Indeed, in the form of duets, the most delicate issues also acquire the sensitivity, attention and delicacy of colleagues. “The Mediterranean theme transformed into a nightmare for many I had already faced it in 2016 in “Through the water” with De Gregori, aware that only through the dialogue the future of our world may be a little less precarious ”.
This rainbow of sounds, music and words born through dialogue, exchange, creative mutual aid between her and her lifelong friends, even belonging to different generations, finds another apex in “E duorme stelle”.
“I wrote it for Giuliano Sangiorgi’s daughter and here I reinterpret it together with two blind children who introduced me to Sister Paola of the Capodimonte monastery. The nun wrote to me that Francesco, a child from Arzano, was my huge fan, so on Easter day I gave him my visit as a gift. Sophia, on the other hand, I met her at the Incoronata Basilica. They both loved singing immensely and I wanted them by my side in the recording, which the director Edoardo De Angelis then chose as the soundtrack for “Natale in Casa Cupiello” with Sergio Castellitto ”.
Attention to social issues also translates into the choice of perpetual tours …
“In fact I go to Agadir, New York, to Sziget in Hungary, to the great jazz festivals, but also to San Giovanni a Teduccio. Or, as it happened to me recently, to bring back a live in Caivano 17 years after the end of the Caivano Rock experiment. I wanted to be the presence to link an idea for the restart. The market area was packed, a sign that the people want to get on the culture wagon if someone approaches them. If, in those two hours, even a single child begins to love music as he did with me in the juke box with James Brown and Tina Turner, it means that my sound is not played but ringing “.
This last album also has a thaumaturgical purpose?
“More than a voice of hope, it expresses an aspiration for a better, more reassuring world; knocks on the heart, it wants to be a listening that makes you feel good. And I would like it to work like meditation, which is practiced to have a return not immediately but in the long term ”.
Then it also expresses the potential of the team that knows how to overcome individualisms. And among the stars it might not be obvious …
“The project was born during the pandemic and did not arise from a planned commitment but from the desire to be together, it was not immediately aimed at the product but at the work, therefore to something higher than the crude everyday life, linked to earnings and business. Then ego and protagonism, in this case, did not give rise to any form of competition. I like their stuff “.
If you could make a dedication who would it go to?
“To the courage of the men who every day earn their existence moment by moment. I would raise a hymn to life ”.
Who has left the deepest trace in your life so far?
“James Brown because not only did he choose me to open his concerts in Italy but he was also the one who pushed me to return to my homeland. Here, he gave me the concrete feeling that dreams can come true, that we must always believe in them. And that after the collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa who opened me to rap with “Street Happiness” I could bring something of my own into the world, that contamination must not be colonization, that all musical forms in the world must be recovered but to give life to new forms “.
The first contact with Jovanotti with whom he duetted at the Beach Party in Castel Volturno also dates back to that period, mid-eighties …
“Well he loves my” Soul Express “very much, from one of which (‘Carry only your heart with you / The train of the soul travels light / We are all made of the same color’) the song that gives its name to ‘album, thanks to the reinterpretation made by Rocco Hunt and the Boomdabash. But, to return to Lorenzo, the strangest thing is that when I came to Italy with Afrika Bambaataa he was the first to host me in his “1, 2, 3 Jovanotti” program. On the record we do “Simm ‘all one” together, perhaps the most social song on the album “.