Eugenio Bennato

Eugenio Bennato
Eugenio Bennato
  • country:Italy
  • region:Napoli
  • style(s):Folk, Mediterranean
  • label:Taranta Power
  • type:Composer/Songwriter
  • instrumentation:instrumental, vocal
  • artist posted by:Tarantapower

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Eugenio Bennato founded the Nuova Compagnia di
Canto Popolare (New Company of Popular Song) in
1969, at that time the most important ethnic
research and revival group in Southern Italy. During
the 70s, the NCCP won the hearts of the young and
had a considerable influence on Italian artists from
the Neapolitan SchoolHe recorded six albums with
the NCCP, and after his debut at the Festival dei
Due Mondi di Spoleto ('72) toured with great
success in Italy and abroad (France, England,
Germany, Yugoslavia, USSR, Argentina, etc.)
In 1976 he set up MUSICANOVA and began an
independent career as a composer, referring heavily
to the popular style. He released many successful
albums, includingBrigante se morein 1979,
containing tracks on the theme of brigandage in
Southern Italy. This work is still very popular with
young audiences, and is rendered also by many,
many street singers appearing again and again in
their performances. He has written numerous
soundtracks for cinema, theatre and classical ballet.
Most prominent among them are Don Quixote by
Maurizio Scaparro (1984, Colonna Sonora
Soundtrack) prize), Cavalli si nasce by Sergio Staino
and La stanza dello Scirocco by Maurizio Sciarra for
which he received the most prestigious recognition
in Italy for soundtrack composition, the Nastro
d'Argento (1988 and 1999).
In 1998 he founded the movement Taranta Power
which in the wake of an extraordinary renewed
interest in the ritual Tarantella rhythms among the
younger public, advanced the proliferation of this
dance through various creative forms (music,
cinema, theatre). Taranta Power " (1999) has
become also a Cd: the musical synthesis of a
movement that breaks with the past of italian
popular music. Between 1999 and 2001 he released
two CDs under the titles:Lezioni di tarantella and
Tarantella del Gargano: two collection of the
various Tarantella forms in different regions of the
South, recorded by the original local artists, with
high quality technical and musical values.
February 2000 saw the realisation of the Lezioni di
tarantella tour, bringing the grand masters of the
Tarantella to Social Centres in Florence, Milan,
Padua, Bologna and Rome.
Eugenio Bennato's international Taranta Power tour
began in Autumn 1999 with concerts in prestige
theatres in the principal cities of Eastern Europe:
Belgrade, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Tallinn Warsaw,
Prague, Pristine and Skopje.
Overseas activity continued in 2000-2001 in
Morocco (Casablanca and Rabat), Tunisia (Tunis,
Hammamet), Australia (Adelaide, Melbourne,
Sidney, Brisbane), Canada (Toronto, Vancouver),
U.S.A. (Los Angeles), Argentina (Buenos Aires,
Cordoba, Mar del Plata), Spain (Barcelona), France
(Paris, Marseilles), Algeria (Algiers, Oran).
On 17 February 2001 he took part in the Womad
festival in Adelaide, his track Taranta Power was
included in a compilation of this festival headed by
Peter Gabriel, who extended the invitation to
perform in July and September 2001, under the
Womad umbrella in Reading and Singapore.
In the 2001 he founded the School of Taranta and
popular dancing of Mediterranean in Bologna (Italy):
the first school in Italy active in the research and
popularizer of Southern Italy's popular dancing.
Released in June 2002 the new CD Let the
Mediterranean be , this is the fruit of a cultural and
artistic journey that has organically extended the
idea of Italian ethnic music on to a Mediterranean
horizon.
The tour, Che il Mediterraneo sia, begun in summer
2002, can be said to have reached its culmination
at the closing event of the Festival of Egyptian
Cinema at the Cairo Opera in December 2004. The
tour gained momentum through 2003 and 2004,
stopping off at important events like the Sfinks
festival and the Festival de Brugges in Belgium, the
Stimmen festival and the Nuremberg Festival in
Germany, the Festival di Villanova and the Festival
di Salamanca in Spagna, the B.B.C. Union Chapel in
the U.K.; Festival du Vent in Corsica, Roman Forum
di Shangai (October 2004) in China, and the Cairo
Opera in December2004; giving end to an
extraordinary experience that already had been in
many Mediterranean countries (Southern France,
Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey,
Greece, Albania, Croatia...) and African ones,
(Mozambique, Swaziland South Africa) in Europe,
(France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany,
Spain, England, etc).
Eugenio collaborated with his brother Eduardo
Bennato on the composition of the soundtrack for
the animated film, Toto Sapore (a Medusa
-Lanterna magica coproduction), released in the
cinema at Christmas 2003. These songs led to the
creation of a musical, Pizza Story where Edoardo's
world of rock blended with Eugenio's ethnic sound.
This show was a huge success with the public
during its summer 2004 tour.
In the 2005 is published digitally remastered his
entire back catalogue, as well as Da lontano a
collection of songs from Taranta Power, but with an
experimental remixing in co-operation with the
band Bisca. In the meanwhile, ,the concert season
goes on being enriched by new and important
stages: Addis Abeba, Cayro, Tabarka Festival in
Tunis, Medfest of Thessaloniky, Pristina and Pec in
Kossovo, as well as a tour in Wales (Swansea,
Cardigan, Aberystwyth, Builth Wells, Llangiollen,
Caernarfon).
At the present time, Eugenio Bennato is involved in
finishing his new recording work titled
Sponda Sud, containing all unreleased tracks; its
publication is expected for the 2006. I want to begin by quoting
one of the masters of the twentieth century, a precursory artist;
Pablo Picasso. He stated: "research means nothing in itself; the
point is not to seek but to find". For decades I have been
researching popular music, seeking to uncover emotion as well
as information, but the thing I feel most at ease with is creating
melodies, harmonies and verse in other words the work of the
composer, always hoping to succeed in creating something that
has value in its own right and has a contemporary resonance.
Some things I have written have actually stayed in the memory,
at least among that band of listeners found a long way from
mass consumption music. And I have to say with some
satisfaction that my works have often been instrumental in
channelling and stimulating cultural trends that have extended
beyond the scope of the mere publication of a music CD.
In 1999 Taranta Power opened up an era of renewed interest in
the music of our roots and traditions, particularly the ritualistic
rhythms of the Taranta. Schools, courses and festivals have
flourished, culminating in gatherings that have attracted tens of
thousands of spectators, as in Melpignano and Caulonia.
In 2002, with con "Che il Mediterraneo sia" (Let the
Mediterranean Be), I tried to develop an alternative horizon for
our popular music, embracing the myths and traditions of other
countries from North Africa and the Middle East, in an attempt
to rediscover those ancient, mythic traces of exchange, voyages
and reciprocal influences.
And now in 2005 I am writing "Sponda sud" (Southern Shore).
It is difficult to talk about a job that involves me as it does at the
moment, in such an indefinable and non-rational task as the
creation of a melody or lyric, but I can explain "Sponda sud" by
saying that this work is definitely connected with my own
travels, with the continual touring around the world, with the
continual measuring of my own roots and traditions against
those of distant peoples. This new work is the continuation of a
previously plotted course, a broadening of the Mediterranean
horizon to more distant latitudes, particularly to the intense and
mysterious entity of Africa, which for me is an idealised land, the
keeper of the wellspring of all myth and the secret of a primitive
rhythmic sound that crosses deserts and seas to reach our
shores, which echo to the sound of guitars and 'tammore'. From
Naples to Gargano to Calabria, these voices, these melodies,
these dances, transport me to Algeria, to Oran, to Casablanca
and even further afield, to Cairo, Ethiopia and Mozambique. Each
destination offers a revelation, a point of recognition along a line
of artistic and emotional development, which offers an
alternative to the devastating logic of business and the steam-
rolling effect of globalisation, against which the tamburo drums
of each village silently join together in opposition.

Records

"Sponda Sud" - Eugenio Bennato