Fire and tears, energy and sweetness. Rhythm and singing, inseparably united. Synthesized in the songs that they did (and do) dance and think at the same time. Is dead at 76 years, on the night of 13 February, Franco Del Prete, drummer and lyricist of naples, the touch and the soul of the Showmen, Napoli Centrale, the energy that flowed behind many songs of Eduardo De Crescenzo, Enzo Gragnaniello. A teacher for two or three generations of musicians from Naples and its province, in the last fifty years, have interacted with the entire world, also thanks to him.

Franco Del Prete was one of the first “black half”. The beginning of the sixties, the Showmen that are simply the revolution: bring together the tradition of Italian melodic with the fury of the Rhythm & Blues that arrive in the province thanks to the disks that the american soldiers brought with them. Their version of one more hour with you I would like to wins the Cantagiro of 1968, leaving everyone speechless with You’re beautiful as you are, with Me you are entered into my heart. And that’s only the first chapter.

When the Showmen run out of their dish, Franco Del Prete, with friend James Senese, makes another revolution. In the Italian musical panorama and not only in the early seventies, the Napoli Centrale are a spaceship. Fusion is just a label: there is jazz, there is the neapolitan tradition, there is the pain of those who have nothing to live for, there is the desire for redemption of those who live in the province. And especially, there is the fact that they play to fear. They sing in dialect, are raw, luogocomunismo that always plagues Naples is simply withdrawn. And in those songs – Campaign of all – the words of Franco Del Prete are the perfect image of that province to the north of Naples, which allows the beauty only in the immateriality of art, of music.

And the Napoli Centrale are the detonator of all the Neapolitan Power: a young Pino Daniele was recruited as a bass player, he then begins to walk alone. But this is a Whole n ata history. After the seventies, The Priest is a permanent laboratory: plays and records with Gino Paoli, with Edoardo De Crescenzo. Working with Sal Da Vinci, Peppino Di Capri, Enzo Gragnaniello. He writes for Lucio Dalla, to Raiz, Almamegretta, to Zulu 99 Posse. Without ever forgetting the transmission of knowledge. In the last decades, to surround himself with young people of that same province for the South project Express.

Why is the Franc Of the Priest was also a teacher and tireless. With dozens of guys that thanks to him they discovered the battery. His house Frattamaggiore, in the province of Naples, is always open for those who had the intention and desire to learn. Technique lessons where there was always something that had to do with the other: with the understanding that the entire technology of the world is at the service of others: being able to say, loud and clear, who you are and where you come from. As Franco has done, word for word, a detachment of a battery after the other.

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